Today’s complex manufacturing systems operate in a changing environment rife with uncertainty strengthening the requirement for developing production systems with the ability of self adaptation. Market competition forces production firms to work more and more efficiently. As a consequence, continuously increasing material removal rate and flexible automation tools, without active human supervision can be observed as trends also in the metal cutting industry. Monitoring the chip breaking process is one of the important factors for automated supervision. The paper presents artificial neural network (ANN) based models for identifying the cutting chip form based on measured monitoring data.

Measurement and control systems are essential in industrial applications. They are used to control and automate all kinds of processes during production. Their use in private homes is not so obvious due to the fact that the requirements are totally different. Although there are systems to connect sensors and actuators inside buildings using fieldbus technology they are only used for simple tasks like switching light and controlling the heating installation.
Through a gateway it is possible to build tele-services that allow any kind of maintenance by the inhabitants or service personal. The service personal will be able to run diagnostics on parts of the system as far as allowed (heat control, failure analysis on certain devices, surveillance, etc.). The access has to be restricted to prevent unauthorized persons to intrude the system.
This work will describe the gateway and the concepts used to share well defined services that are provided to users remotely and locally.

This paper presents a method of simplifying the diagnostic accuracy estimation for compressed mammograms. The proposed method consists of three main stages: a) the selection of abnormal structure features susceptible to wavelet compression method, b) subjective ratings of diagnostically important features and c) estimation of diagnostic pattern for processed mammograms. This pattern reflects diagnostic ability of radiologists using encoded images in clinical practice. Experimental pattern estimation confirmed even higher diagnostic quality of compressed to 1 bpp mammograms than their 12 bpp originals.

Mobile Flash-Cards in different technologies and formats are well suited to act as an exchangeable non volatile mass storage for data or program code in measurement devices and small automation systems. Due to the use in the fields of digital photography and multimedia applications, flash cards have been introduced into the market and are available in a standardized and compact way. Because of their mobile characteristics, their solid-state design, security features and an easy handling, they are an appropriate storage medium in measurement data acquisition, but furthermore in the field of service and maintenance. This article is supposed to give an overview of the available storage media on the market as well as several ideas for the use in the field of measurement device instrumentation. In addition, the characteristics of the several flash cards are discussed, possible advantages and restrictions are compared.

Neutral electrodes (grounding plates used in electrosurgical operations) were tested with thermo cameras in volunteers experiments. These experiments are difficult to perform and expensive. A new test device swaroTEST with a measuring board "electronic skin" simulates the relevant electrical features of human skin to replace volunteer experiments. This device consists of a three dimensional resistor network representing the electric features of the skin and muscle tissue, and a temperature sensing array (one transistor for each cm²) to measure the resultant temperature increase after a standardized current load (700 mA hf current during 60 s, proposed in the relevant AAMI HF-18 standard). The comparison of test results with thermo camera images of volunteer experiments showed a sufficient coincidence, which proves the applicability of this test device to replace volunteer experiments.