Fall Prevention Shoes Using Camera-Based Line-Laser Obstacle Detection System.

Fall prevention is an important issue particularly for the elderly. This paper proposes a camera-based line-laser obstacle detection system to prevent falls in the indoor environment. When obstacles are detected, the system will emit alarm messages to catch the attention of the user. Because the elderly spend a lot of their time at home, the proposed line-laser obstacle detection system is designed mainly for indoor applications. Our obstacle detection system casts a laser line, which passes through a horizontal plane and has a specific height to the ground. A camera, whose optical axis has a specific inclined angle to the plane, will observe the laser pattern to obtain the potential obstacles. Based on this configuration, the distance between the obstacles and the system can be further determined by a perspective transformation called homography. After conducting the experiments, critical parameters of the algorithms can be determined, and the detected obstacles can be classified into different levels of danger, causing the system to send different alarm messages.

Genetic rearrangements of variable di-residue (RVD)-containing repeat arrays in a baculoviral TALEN system.

Virus-derived gene transfer vectors have been successfully employed to express the transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) in mammalian cells. Since the DNA-binding domains of TALENs consist of the variable di-residue (RVD)-containing tandem repeat modules and virus genome with repeated sequences is susceptible to genetic recombination, we investigated several factors that might affect TALEN cleavage efficiency of baculoviral vectors. Using a TALEN system designed to target the AAVS1 locus, we observed increased sequence instability of the TALE repeat arrays when a higher multiplicity of infection (MOI) of recombinant viruses was used to produce the baculoviral vectors. We also detected more deleterious mutations in the TALE DNA-binding domains when both left and right TALEN arms were placed into a single expression cassette as compared to the viruses containing one arm only. The DNA sequence changes in the domains included deletion, addition, substitution, and DNA strand exchange between the left and right TALEN arms. Based on these observations, we have developed a protocol using a low MOI to produce baculoviral vectors expressing TALEN left and right arms separately. Cotransduction of the viruses produced by this optimal protocol provided an improved TALEN cleavage efficiency and enabled effective site-specific transgene integration in human cells.