This paper investigates the use of mobile phones and tablets for learning purposes among university students in Saudi Arabia. For this purpose, an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is proposed to analyze the adoption of mobile devices and smart phones by Saudi university students for accessing course materials, searching the web for information related to their discipline, sharing know...

In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to determine the electronic system components of a smart clothing system design developed for blinds. The integration of diverse components which are developed and produced by different technologies and materials is a major challenge in a smart clothing system technology. Therefore, an integrated methodology based on fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (...

In this paper, we introduce a vision called Smart Material Interfaces (SMIs), which takes advantage of the latest generation of engineered materials that has a special property defined “smart”. They are capable of changing their physical properties, such as shape, size and color, and can be controlled by using certain stimuli (light, potential difference, temperature and so on). We describe SMI...

In recent years alternative renewable energies including that obtained by solar cells have attracted much attention due to exhaustion of other conventional energy resources especially fossil-based fuels. Photovoltaic energy is one of the cleanest, most applicable and promising alternative energy using limitless sun light as raw material. Even though, inorganic solar cells dominate in the world ...

Smart Grids are becoming a reality all over the world. Nowadays, the research efforts for the introduction and deployment of these grids are mainly focused on the development of the field of Smart Metering. This emerging application requires the use of technologies to access the significant number of points of supply (PoS) existing in the grid, covering the Low Voltage (LV) segment with the low...

The growth of the population of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets provides huge amount of idling computing power. Smart phone technology drastically reduces the use of power for doing common internet applications such as chatting, send/receive mail, downloading music, video, data from internet. Smart phones now drastically replaces the normal cell phones. Smart phones can be used ...

This article highlights the very recent advances in glycopolypeptide synthesis via NCA polymerization and first studies on stimuli-responsive solution behavior and self-assembling structures. Yet glycopolypeptides are almost exclusively considered as smart biofunctional materials for use in biomedical applications, for instance in targeted drug delivery, but also have high potential for usage a...

INTRODUCTION Each of us reacts to the world around and within us by sensing and actuating. When our hand is in contact with a hot object, we sense the heat, our brain sends a command, and our arm muscles actuate our hand away from the object. Similarly, because of internal sensing, we will tend to favor the burned hand until it has healed. As technology progresses, it becomes reasonable to ask,...

We are literally the stuff from which our tissue fabrics and their fibers are woven and spun. The arrangement of collagen, elastin and other structural proteins in space and time embodies our tissues and organs with amazing resilience and multifunctional smart properties. For example, the periosteum, a soft tissue sleeve that envelops all nonarticular bony surfaces of the body, comprises an inh...

A fundamental step in the model construction for ferroelectric, ferromagnetic, and ferroelastic materials is the estimation or identification of material parameters given measurements of the material response. Moreover, actuator and/or material properties may be a function of operating conditions which can necessitate the re-estimation of parameters if conditions change significantly. In this p...