Battery-based energy storage (BESS) has found to have potential and interest in reducing the peak demand. Over the years, a number of control strategies have been developed for BESS to reduce the peak demand. The control strategies are however complex and confined to simulation evaluation only. The control strategies are also not tested in BESS set-up with limited capacity. A simple and yet comprehensive real-time active peak demand reduction control has therefore been developed and presented in this paper. The real-time active control has been evaluated experimentally using the university building as the site. The performance of the real-time control has been evaluated as compared to the fundamental control as well as the ideal reduction in simulation. Even though the capacity is limited, the results showed superiority and adoptability of the real-time active control as compared to the fundamental control, with peak demand reduction of about 8.64% as compared to 4.24%. The real-time active control also showed higher accuracy of 70.52% towards the ideal reduction result as compared to the fundamental control with only 35.25%.

Photovoltaic systems (PV) have been growing extensively due to various government incentives to improve the security of energy supply and mitigate the climate change issue. Usually, customers own the PV systems that operate on the customer networks to reduce the fuel generated electricity. The customers expect the PV systems to operate as reliable as possible in order to justify their financial investment. However, based on the current practice, any PV systems must be shut down immediately if the customer networks are apart from the grid. Such a practice is established to minimise the damages or risks due to the unregulated voltage and frequency on the islanded networks. However, this practice can cause any available clean energy to be wasted during the outage of the grid. Therefore, a wireless fuzzy-controlled energy storage system is proposed to be used with the PV systems to provide an effective means of regulating the frequency and voltage throughout the outage of the grid. A number of case studies have been carried out to prove that the energy storage systems are an effective approach of regulating the voltage and frequency of the islanded networks. The customers can continue to gain their financial benefits from their existing PV systems. The utility company can improve the performance of their networks by reducing the number of power outages.

Clinical scales such as Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA) and Motor Assessment Scale (MAS) are widely used to evaluate stroke patient’s motor performance. However, there are several limitations with these assessment scales such as subjectivity, lack of repeatability, time-consuming and highly depend on the ability of the physiotherapy. In contrast, robot-based assessments are objective, repeatable, and could potentially reduce the assessment time. However, robot-based assessments are not as well established as conventional assessment scale and the correlation to conventional assessment scale is unclear.

Rehabilitation robots have become increasingly popular for stroke rehabilitation. However, the high cost of robots hampers their implementation on a large scale. This paper implements the concept of a modular and reconfigurable robot, reducing its cost and size by adopting different therapeutic end effectors for different training movements using a single robot. The challenge is to increase the robot's portability and identify appropriate kinds of modular tools and configurations. Because literature on the effectiveness of this kind of rehabilitation robot is still scarce, this paper presents the design of a portable and reconfigurable rehabilitation robot and describes its use with a group of post-stroke patients for wrist and forearm training. Seven stroke subjects received training using a reconfigurable robot for 30 sessions, lasting 30 min per session. Post-training, statistical analysis showed significant improvement of 3.29 points (16.20%, p = 0.027) on the Fugl-Meyer assessment scale for forearm and wrist components. Significant improvement of active range of motion was detected in both pronation-supination (75.59%, p = 0.018) and wrist flexion-extension (56.12%, p = 0.018) after the training. These preliminary results demonstrate that the developed reconfigurable robot could improve subjects' wrist and forearm movement.

Conventional assessment scales are widely used to quantify motor performance in stroke survivors. Although they are widely used, there are several limitations with these assessment scales such as lack of repeatability, subjective, time-consuming and it depends on the ability of the trained physiotherapist. In contrast, robot-based assessments are highly repeatable, objective, and could potentially reduce assessment time. However, robot-based assessments are not as well established as conventional assessment scale and the correlation to conventional assessment scale is unclear. This study was to determine if there are any similarities in the movements between the proposed robotic assessment modules namely as Draw Square, Draw Diamond and Draw Circle and between the sequences, clockwise and counter clockwise on 10 male healthy subjects. Result shows that there are no similarities between each robotic assessment modules and between the sequences. All kinematic variables extracted from each robotic assessment modules can be used as benchmark for assessment purpose in stroke patient.

Rehabilitation robots are gradually becoming popular for stroke rehabilitation to improve motor recovery. By using a robot, the patient may perform the training more frequently on their own, but they must be motivated to do so. Therefore, this project develops a set of rehabilitation training programs with different haptic modalities on Compact Rehabilitation Robot (CR2) - a robot used to train upper and lower limbs reaching movement. The paper present the developed haptic interface, Haptic Sense with five configurable haptic modalities that include sensations of weight, wall, spring, sponge and visual amplification. A combination of several haptic modalities was implemented into virtual reality games, Water Drop - a progressive training game with up to nine levels of difficulties that requires user to move the cup to collect the water drops.

Stroke is the leading cause of disability. Reaching movement is the most important movement for many daily activities routine. Rehabilitation is to encourage and enhanced recovery process. Conventional rehabilitation is one-to-one intervention where labour intensive and lack of repeatability. In addition, the stroke assessments by physiotherapist are subjective and not independent. Thus, this paper will describe the design and development of non-motorized system for assessing the patients’ motor function. This system will be used in the future to find the correlation between conventional assessments scales such Fugl-Mayer Assessment (FMA), Chedoke-McMaster Stroke Assessment Scale (CMSA) and Motor Assessment Scale (MAS) and robotic assessment.

Stroke is the leading cause of severe disability worldwide, with up to 15 million of people suffer stroke every year. Survivors of stroke can recover their physical strength, provided they undergo proper rehabilitation. However, most of the rehabilitation centres provide only basic tools as they can rarely afford the expensive and advanced rehabilitation devices. Besides that, training with therapists is limited to few hours per week due to the large number of patients and the stroke patients are generally sent home once they are mobile, although their upper limbs functions are not recovered. Stroke patients need to continue training after stroke to avoid muscle contraction, but due to large number of patients, they are not able to train frequently in the hospital. Therefore, the goal of this project is to develop a low-cost, simple yet compact rehabilitation robot for stroke patient to train both upper and lower limbs reaching movement. Compact Rehabilitation Robot (CR2) is expected to help the stroke patients training reaching movement in an enhanced virtual reality environment with haptic feedback and to provide the stroke patients with a faster track towards recovery.