Ramiro Velázquez

• Professor
• Vice President at Panamerican University

A prototype of an electronic nose (e-nose) system integrating a set of general-purpose gas sensors, an electronic module, and signal processing and classification methods has been designed and implemented to detect certain environmental odors that might pose a risk to human health. The proposed device explores the filter diagonalization method (FDM...

In recent years, the growing number of vehicles on the road have exacerbated issues related to safety and traffic congestion. However, the advent of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) holds the potential to transform mobility, enhance traffic management and safety, and create smarter, more interconnected road networks. This paper addresses key road saf...

This paper introduces a novel method for the efficient recognition of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) using an electronic nose (e-nose) device coupled with advanced signal processing and classification techniques. The proposed e-nose is a cost-effective sensor array designed to detect a broad spectrum of VOCs with applications in several domains...

Recent progress in automotive safety has led to the development of an intelligent multi-sensor system for monitoring driver stress and fatigue. Monitoring the driver's psycho-physical state helps reduce risks to drivers and pedestrians. A literature review has been conducted on existing systems for detecting bio-signals and their use in evaluating...

Recent progress has led to the widespread use of Machine Learning (ML) in various fields, including biomedical applications. ML can assist in the diagnosis by detecting disease-specific patterns and monitoring the patient's condition. Furthermore, ML algorithms can be implemented on resource-limited systems thanks to emerging technologies like the...

This work presents an in-depth evaluation of the telecommunications landscape in Mexico from 2015 to 2023. The study’s primary focus is on the disparities in broadband access, telecommunications infrastructure, and digital inclusion across various regions, particularly between urban and rural areas. By employing predictive models and correlation an...

The Internet of Things (IoT) has radically changed the industrial world, enabling the integration of numerous systems and devices into the industrial ecosystem. There are many areas of the manufacturing industry in which IoT has contributed, including plants' remote monitoring and control, energy efficiency, more efficient resources management, and...

This research explores the application of wireless sensor networks for the non-invasive monitoring of sleep quality and vital signs in elderly individuals, addressing significant challenges faced by the aging population. The study implemented and evaluated WSNs in home environments, focusing on variables such as breathing frequency, deep sleep, sno...

This research paper delves into the effectiveness and impact of behavior change techniques fostered by information technologies, particularly wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, within the realms of engineering and computer science. By conducting a comprehensive review of the relevant literature sourced from the Scopus database, this st...

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are useful in medicine for monitoring the vital signs of elderly patients. These sensors allow for remote monitoring of a patient’s state of health, making it easier for elderly patients, and allowing to avoid or at least to extend the interval between visits to specialized health centers. The proposed system is a low...

In this paper, the processing of the data of a 3D light detection and distance measurement (LiDAR) sensor mounted on a mobile robot is shown, introducing an innovative methodology to manage the data and extracting useful information. The LiDAR sensor is placed on a mobile robot with a modular design that permits the easy change of the number of whe...

Assisted technology combined with sensor networks is an emerging technology for better homecare of people requiring specific support. In this work, we focus our attention on monitoring vital signs and accident prevention of older adults in residential areas without invasive and uncomfortable medical devices. We prototyped two vital signal monitorin...

Wearable technology represents a new technological paradigm for promoting physical activity, enabling monitoring of performances and athletic gestures. In addition, they can be employed for remote health monitoring applications, allowing continuous acquisition of users' vital signs directly at home, emergency alerting, and computer-assisted rehabil...

Sensor networks are deployed in people’s homes to make life easier and more comfortable and secure. They might represent an interesting approach for elderly care as well. This work highlights the benefits of a sensor network implemented in the homes of a group of users between 55 and 75 years old, which encompasses a simple home energy optimization...

One of the main tasks of a cadastral surveyor is to accurately determine property boundaries by measuring control points and calculating their coordinates. This paper proposes the development of a remotely-controlled tracking system to perform cadastral measurements. A Bluetooth-controlled rover was developed, including a Raspberry Pi Zero W module...

Currently, graphical data is becoming increasingly ubiquitous with new technologies. However, today’s technologies are still of limited access to such representations (images, graphs, charts…) for Visually Impaired People (VIP). The quantity and quality of presented information are key points of efficient accessibility. Therefore, this paper propos...

The high-speed operation of unbalanced machines may cause vibrations that lead to noise, wear, and fatigue that will eventually limit their efficiency and operating life. To restrain such vibrations, a complete balancing must be performed. This paper presents the complete balancing optimization of a six-bar mechanism with the use of counterweights....

This paper introduces a compact, affordable electronic nose (e-nose) device devoted to detect the presence of toxic compounds that could affect human health, such as carbon monoxide, combustible gas, hydrogen, methane, and smoke, among others. Such artificial olfaction device consists of an array of six metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) sensors and a...

This study addresses sensor allocation by analyzing exponential stability for discrete-time teleoperation systems. Previous studies mostly concentrate on the continuous-time teleoperation systems and neglect the management of significant practical phenomena, such as data-swap, the effect of sampling rates of samplers, and refresh rates of actuators...

This paper introduces a computer-based system devoted to process the sound that is produced when a corn-based food product is masticated. The system allows a simple and high-quality sound acquisition eliminating any interference caused by noise and other environmental artifacts. Its user interface displays the collected data in both time and freque...

This paper presents a smart garment to monitor the environmental parameters and user’s vital signs; the wearable application is meant to monitor workers’ conditions in harsh workplaces. The smart jacket integrates a multisource harvesting section for gathering energy from sources associated with the human body (light, heat, movements), guaranteeing...

This paper presents the design of a sensing device for monitoring and storing the atmospheric and noise pollution data, using technology with zero impact on the environment. The system consists of an eco-friendly sensor pitch equipped with a multi-sources harvesting system used to scavenge energy from renewable sources (wind and solar light), makin...

Las técnicas de balanceo de mecanismos han sido utilizadas a lo largo de los años para extender la vida útil de las máquinas reduciendo las vibraciones, el desgaste y la fatiga de sus componentes. Sin embargo, al tiempo que estas técnicas han crecido en efectividad lo han hecho también en complejidad matemática. Hoy en día la mayoría de los métodos...

Technological innovation has increased the global demand for electrical power and energy. Accordingly, energy harvesting has become a research area of primary interest for the scientific community and companies because it constitutes a sustainable way to collect energy from various sources. In particular, kinetic energy generated from human walking...

Shaking force balancing of mechanisms usually is achieved by an optimal redistribution of the moving masses. This allows the cancellation or the reduction of the variable dynamic loads on the mechanism’s frame. The procedure generally leads to a considerable increment in the mass. Addition of counterweights and counter-inertias are required, thus t...

This paper overviews the modeling, implementation, and mechanical characterization of an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) devoted to transport materials and tools in smart factories. The design is based on a differential-drive mobile robot configuration for which the mathematical model was obtained. Such model allows the simulation of the AGV's motio...

A multirate adaptive inverse dynamic controller is presented in this study to provide the stability and reliable trajectory for robotic manipulators. The proposed controller has been implemented on the experimental Gryphon which is a five degrees of freedom industrial robot and has emulated the movement of human arm in take and place missions. The...

The detection of cracks is an important monitoring task in civil engineering infrastructure devoted to ensuring durability, structural safety, and integrity. It has been traditionally performed by visual inspection, and the measurement of crack width has been manually obtained with a crack-width comparator gauge (CWCG). Unfortunately, this techniqu...

Until a safe and effective vaccine to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus is developed and available for the global population, preventive measures, such as wearable tracking and monitoring systems supported by Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures are valuable tools for containing the pandemic. This review paper analyses innovative wearable systems for...

In this research work, a fast and lightweight AES-128 cypher based on the Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA board is presented, suitable for 5G communications. In particular, both encryption and decryption algorithms have been developed using a pipelined approach, so enabling the simultaneous processing of the rounds on multiple data packets at each clock cycle....

The demand for wearable devices to measure respiratory activity is constantly growing, finding applications in a wide range of scenarios (e.g., clinical environments and workplaces, outdoors for monitoring sports activities, etc.). Particularly, the respiration rate (RR) is a vital parameter since it indicates serious illness (e.g., pneumonia, emph...

Flow slow-down in rivers and artificial canals is a basic aspect to be monitored and kept strictly under control. Flow slow-downs can become a major concern in the event of extreme phenomena. The paper illustrates an advanced image processing method that uses particle tracking velocimetry in conjunction with a monadic approach to better characteriz...

Gait analysis has many applications, and specifically can improve the control of prosthesis, exoskeletons, or Functional Electrical Stimulation systems. The use of canes is common to complement the assistance in these cases, and the synergy between upper and lower limbs can be exploited to obtain information about the gait. This is interesting espe...

This paper reports on the progress of a wearable assistive technology (AT) device designed to enhance the independent, safe, and efficient mobility of blind and visually impaired pedestrians in outdoor environments. Such device exploits the smartphone’s positioning and computing capabilities to locate and guide users along urban settings. The neces...

The field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices are ideal solutions for high-speed processing applications, given their flexibility, parallel processing capability, and power efficiency. In this review paper, at first, an overview of the key applications of FPGA-based platforms in 5G networks/systems is presented, exploiting the improved performan...

The evolution of low power electronics and the availability of new smart materials are opening new frontiers to develop wearable systems for medical applications, lifestyle monitoring, and performance detection. This paper presents the development and realization of a novel smart insole for monitoring the plantar pressure distribution and gait para...

Food products elicit both psychological and physiological reactions in consumers that influence their liking and buying decisions. In particular, the physiological reactions toward food products have recently become of interest to better understand consumer behavior. To increase the chances of success in the market, pre-sale food product assessment...

Mobile robots and rovers play an important role in many industrial applications. Under certain constraints, they are suitable in harsh environments and conditions in which protracted human activity is not safe or permitted. In many circumstances, mechanical aspects and electrical consumption need to be optimized for autonomous and wheeled mobile ro...

Mobile robots and rovers play an important role in many industrial applications. Under certain constraints, they are suitable in harsh environments and conditions in which protracted human activity is not safe or permitted. In many circumstances, mechanical aspects and electrical consumption need to be optimized for autonomous and wheeled mobile ro...

Solar energy utilization has been triggered by advances in new technology to reduce the cost of photovoltaic (PV) panels with an increase of efficiency. To improve the energy production quality, it is necessary to undergo the PV panels to characterization both in the indoor and outdoor scenarios; these latter characterizations generally require all...

The year 2020 will remain in the history for the diffusion of the COVID-19 virus, originating a pandemic on a world scale with over a million deaths. From the onset of the pandemic, the scientific community has made numerous efforts to design systems to detect the infected subjects in ever-faster times, allowing both to intervene on them, to avoid...

This paper presents a novel wearable system devoted to assist the mobility of blind and visually impaired people in urban environments with the simple use of a smartphone and tactile feedback. The system exploits the positioning data provided by the smartphone’s GPS sensor to locate in real-time the user in the environment and to determine the dire...

Point matching in multiple images is an open problem in computer vision because of the numerous geometric transformations and photometric conditions that a pixel or point might exhibit in the set of images. Over the last two decades, different techniques have been proposed to address this problem. The most relevant are those that explore the analys...

The CO2 and water vapor exchange between leaf and atmosphere are relevant for plant physiology. This process is done through the stomata. These structures are fundamental in the study of plants since their properties are linked to the evolutionary process of the plant, as well as its environmental and phytohormonal conditions. Stomatal detection is...

This paper introduces a novel low-cost solar-powered wearable assistive technology (AT) device, whose aim is to provide continuous, real-time object recognition to ease the finding of the objects for visually impaired (VI) people in daily life. The system consists of three major components: a miniature low-cost camera, a system on module (SoM) comp...

High-speed link motion produces reactions that are transmitted to the base of mechanisms causing undesired effects such as vibrations, wear, and fatigue. These problems can be reduced or even better eliminated if a balancing technique is performed. To this day, most of the papers in the literature dealing with the balancing of mechanisms obtain the...

The security of communication and computer systems is an increasingly important issue, nowadays pervading all areas of human activity (e.g., credit cards, website encryption, medical data, etc.). Furthermore, the development of high-speed and light-weight implementations of the encryption algorithms is fundamental to improve and widespread their ap...

The usage of wireless sensor devices in many applications, such as in the Internet of Things and monitoring in dangerous geographical spaces, has increased in recent years. However, sensor nodes have limited power, and battery replacement is not viable in most cases. Thus, energy savings in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the primary concern in...

As an alternative to conventional batteries and other energy scavenging techniques, this paper introduces the idea of using micro-turbines to extract energy from wind forces at the microscale level and to supply power to battery-less microsystems. Fundamental research efforts on the design, fabrication, and test of micro-turbines with blade lengths...

This paper presents the design, implementation, and prototype of a low-cost Braille embossing mechanism. The proposal is a printer head integrating three hammers that, upon actuation, stamp readable dots on the paper. Inspired in the rotary cam-follower mechanism, the hammers are actuated by a single servomotor which rotation determines which hamme...

This paper presents a simulator of non-wide sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (non-WSSUS) multipath fading channels for the performance analysis of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication systems. The proposed simulator is constructed with the combination of the Monte Carlo and sum-of-cisoids (SOC) principles, and it is suitable for multic...

The huge spreading of Internet of Things (IoT)-oriented modern technologies is 17 revolutionizing all fields of human activities, leading several benefits and allowing to strongly 18 optimize classic productive processes. The agriculture field is also affected by these technological 19 advances, resulting in better water and fertilizers' usage and...

The continuous evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) makes it possible to connect everyday objects to networks in order to monitor physical and environmental conditions, which is made possible due to wireless sensor networks (WSN) that enable the transfer of data. However, it has also brought about many challenges that need to be addressed, suc...

Sensory experiences play an important role in consumer response, purchase decision, and fidelity towards food products. Consumer studies when launching new food products must incorporate physiological response assessment to be more precise and, thus, increase their chances of success in the market. This paper introduces a novel sensory analysis sys...

Together with sight and hearing, touch represents a means of communication for human beings. Indeed, the sense of touch is capable of proving a whole non-verbal language that can be developed and offer many more possibilities than traditionally believed. Much of what is found in the literature about tactile communication concerns tactile stimulatio...

The past decades have seen an explosion of new sensors. The integration of advanced sensors, miniaturized components, specific circuits, devices, systems and interfaces with the association of ad hoc signal processing, artificial intelligence and control technologies have allowed the design of new human care, wellbeing and assistive devices and sys...

The problem of shaking force balancing of robotic manipulators, which allows the elimination or substantial reduction of the variable force transmitted to the fixed frame, has been traditionally solved by optimal mass redistribution of the moving links. The resulting configurations have been achieved by adding counterweights, by adding auxiliary st...

In this study, a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) energy model is proposed by defining the energy consumption at each node. Such a model calculates the energy at each node by estimating the energy of the main functions developed at sensing and transmitting data when running the routing protocol. These functions are related to wireless communications a...

In the effort to reduce emissions, in particular those due to energy conversion and transformation, renewal energies can give a substantial contribution in this field. For house heating, direct exploitation of subsoil energy is a matter of great interest. To extract subsoil energyfor house utilization, a plant is needed. Among different parts and d...

This paper presents the conceptual design of a low-cost simple printer head for Braille embossers. Such device consists of a set of three rotary cam-follower mechanisms that, upon actuation, produce deformation on paper. The set of cam-followers is actuated by a single servomotor which rotation determines which cam-follower strikes the paper. Brail...

One of the most widely used electro-mechanical systems in large-scale mining is the electric motor. This device is employed in practically every phase of production. For this reason, it needs to be inspected regularly to maintain maximum operability, thus avoiding unplanned stoppages. In order to identify potential faults, regular check-ups are per...

Por el número de usuarios, el Metro de la Ciudad de México es uno de los 10 más importantes a nivel mundial. En cerca del 50% de los trenes en operación, el sistema de apertura de puertas está basado en dispositivos neumáticos. Este mecanismo es responsable de cerca de la mitad de las fallas que ponen fuera de servicio un tren. Con el fin de reduci...

Real-time haptic interactions occur under two exploration modes: active and passive. In this paper, we present a series of experiments that evaluate the main perceptual characteristics of both exploration modes. In particular, we focus on haptic shape recognition as it represents a fundamental task in many applications using haptic environments. Th...

Machine vibrations often occur due to dynamic unbalance inducing wear, fatigue, and noise that limit the potential of many machines. Dynamic balancing is a main concern in mechanism and machine theory as it allows designers to limit the transmission of vibrations to the frames and base of machines. This work introduces a novel method for representi...

The problem of vibrations in civil structures is common; nevertheless, its negative effects can be significantly reduced using structural control methods with intention of maintaining structural welfare as much as possible. This work deals with the study of structural vibration control in a model of a civil-like structure, which consists of three-l...

Presently, the Internet of Things (IoT) concept involves a scattered collection of different multipurpose sensor networks that capture information, which is further processed and used in applications such as smart cities. These networks can send large amounts of information in a fairly efficient but insecure wireless environment. Energy consumption...

Shaking moment balancing of force-balanced mechanisms is typically achieved by the use of counter-inertias that, in general, are very large. This leads to a substantial increase in the total mass of the linkage. In opposition to these traditional methods a novel, simple and direct method that takes advantage of actuation redundancy is proposed. The...

Railway is a critical application; hence, all systems that compose the railway infrastructure must meet two conditions: availability and safety. The availability ensures continuous operation of the system; on the other hand, safety is achieved when the device works properly regardless of the environmental or operating conditions. In addition, Wirel...

This article presents the design optimization of the four-bar linkage for the reduction of the Shaking Force and the Shaking Moment. It is followed a novel procedure based on fully Cartesian Coordinates (Natural Coordinates) and the use of counterweights. These counterweights with as little restrictive constraints on their geometric parameters as p...

This is the conference proceedings on the 2018 Nanotechnology for Instrumentation and Measurement (NANOfIM) about the advances on nanotechnology and nanosciences, their applications and related interdisciplinary fields. Technical co-sponsored by IEEE. Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=8681926