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Passive upper limb exoskeletons are often designed to relieve muscle fatigue of manufacturing workers. Existing exoskeletons often provide partial assistance, and their assistive torque is only affected by elastic elements and mechanisms, which, however, are not sufficient because of the changing load of the shoulder joint due to the motion of the elbow and the weight of various tools. To improve the assistive effect without affecting the free movement of the arm, a passive exoskeletal vest has been designed. This exoskeleton has two operating states which can be switched using a unique ratchet bar mechanism. The upper arm can be locked at any vertical position when engaged. The assistive torque is determined by the load. The arm also can move freely without any resistance when separated. Seven subjects participated in the evaluation experiment, who performed static tasks, precision tasks, and dynamic tasks. The experimental data demonstrate that the exoskeleton can effectively reduce the activation level of related muscles at a variety of tasks. The accuracy and stability of the arm during heavy work are not affected. The exoskeleton has a minimal restriction on the range of motion of the arm. the comfort and portability achieved a high score of 8 (1-10) from subjective measures. The experimental results further revealed that the designed exoskeletal vest could effectively relieve the shoulder burden, where it does not impede or restrain the arm’s movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter constructs the hard reliability from the syndromes to decode low/moderate-density parity-check codes in an ordered statistic way. For regular codes with our proposed decoding algorithm, the error-correction capability can be determined by the column weight and the maximum column intersection of their parity-check matrices. Then, an upper bound is derived to verify their decoding performance in ultra-low region, which may be required by some applications, e.g., McEliece public key cryptosystem and optical communications. It allows us to reduce the size of McEliece public keys with strong security levels due to its good error-correction capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve various tradeoffs between storage and repair bandwidth, this article proposes to construct exact repair codes by grafting two codes ${\mathcal{ C}}_{1}$ and ${\mathcal{ C}}_{2}$. By replacing certain nonzero entries in the generator matrix of ${\mathcal{ C}}_{1}$ by zero, the repair bandwidth of the resulting grafting part decreases. However, it may no longer keep the maximum-distance-separable (MDS) property. As a result, the grafted code ${\mathcal{ C}}_{2}$ takes these nonzero entries into account such that the entire graftage code can keep the MDS property. The relationship between the bandwidth reduction of ${\mathcal{ C}}_{1}$ and the file size of ${\mathcal{ C}}_{2}$ is derived to optimize graftage codes. Our analysis indicates that these graftage codes may provide better tradeoffs than space-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is capable of direct confidential communications over a quantum channel, which is achieved by dispensing with the key agreement channel of the well-known quantum key distribution (QKD). However, to make QSDC a practical reality, we have to mitigate its reliance on quantum memory, its immediate communication interruption caused by eavesdropping and its low transmission reliability due to the heavy qubit losses. Hence a new QSDC protocol is proposed based on a sophisticated coded single-photon DL04 QSDC protocol to tackle the open challenges. In particular, quantum memory is dispensed with and a high-accuracy secrecy capacity estimate is derived for this protocol by conceiving dynamic joint encryption and error-control (JEEC) coding. We demonstrate that this quantum-memory-free DL04 QSDC (QMF-DL04 QSDC) protocol inches closer to the quantum channel’s capacity and significantly improves the original DL04 QSDC’s robustness. Moreover, a rate-compatible low-rate JEEC coding scheme is designed for the proposed framework, and the JEEC code advocated is shown to approach the secrecy capacity, despite tolerating an extremely high loss of qubits in the time-varying wiretap channel. Our simulations and experimental results demonstrate that the QMF-DL04 QSDC scheme significantly increases both the secure information rate and the communication distance of the original DL04 protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a novel method, called doubly-recursive block Markov superposition transmission (DrBMST), to construct high-performance spatially coupled codes. An important characteristic of DrBMST codes is that the degrees of the constraint nodes in their normal graphs are at most three. As a result, DrBMST codes can be decoded with low complexity. We first prove that the error probability of an enlarged DrBMST code ensemble can be made arbitrarily small under windowed maximum-likelihood decoding (MLD) by increasing the decoding window size. This result partially explains the superior performances of DrBMST codes. Then we propose to use the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis to estimate the iterative windowed decoding thresholds of DrBMST codes. The EXIT chart analyses show that, with such a simple structure, DrBMST codes are comparable to BMST codes with large encoding memories in terms of decoding thresholds. Finally, we carry out comparisons to validate the advantages of DrBMST codes in terms of error performances and decoding complexities. In particular, for a decoding latency of 20,000 bits, the DrBMST code performs better than the (4, 8)-regular spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) code, but with lower computational complexity. Hence, DrBMST codes can be used in communication systems with limited computational resources. In addition, we show that DrBMST can be used to construct multiple-rate codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes and explicitly constructs quasi-cyclic (QC) codes for correcting multiple bursts via matrix transformations. Our analysis demonstrates that the multiple-burst-correction capability of QC codes is determined by sub-matrices in the diagonal of their transformed parity-check matrices. By well designing these sub-matrices, the proposed QC codes are able to achieve optimal or asymptotically optimal multiple-burst-correction capability. Moreover, it proves that these codes can be QC low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes, if the diagonal sub-matrices of their transformed parity-check matrices are Hadamard powers of base matrices. Analysis and simulation results show that our QC-LDPC codes perform well over not only random symbol error/erasure channels, but also burst channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]