<p>Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.</p>

Shiv Nadar University

Most of the design activities, today, are focused toward solving issues related to a smaller section of society with average or high-income levels, and the needs of a bigger section of society, belonging to the bottom of the pyramid, are ignored by and large. This is one area of research that requires urgent attention and appropriate design intervention. This paper is an effort to cater to the unaddressed needs of one such section of society that is involved in gardening-related activities. The paper reports a case study on how the issues related to storing and managing the gardening tools and equipment have been addressed. It presents the design development and evaluation from a sustainability point of view. The study involved two gardeners working at a University campus who participated during different stages of designing the new product that addressed their needs and aspirations. The paper also discusses the economic and environmental sustainability aspects of the solution in the light of materials and manufacturing processes used. In the first part, the paper explains the brief background of the user's needs. The second part of the paper analyzes the different aspects of the problem and elaborates on the design process. The paper finally concludes with a discussion on the assessment of the new storage system. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

World University root node

Design

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering

Design of Storage System for Local Gardeners: A Case Study

Government hospitals are the main pillars of the public healthcare services in the country. But due to the ever-growing number of patients and the inadequate infrastructure facilities, they are overburdened and unable to provide proper and prompt medical help to the patients. Medical treatment may include consultation, admission, diagnosis, surgery, drug administration, nursing, blood bank service, ambulance service, etc. The patients/attendants have to follow hospital protocols and processes to avail the required treatment. But they are not acquainted with hospital processes, rules, norms, timings, and other relevant information. They also vary from hospital to hospital. Hence, the visitors need to contact touchpoints like reception counters to help them for the help. But they are always overcrowded with people queued up in lines. In addition, the reception, registration/ entry counters, different departments, diagnosis centers, and other utilities are too scattered within the hospital premises (different buildings, floors, rooms, etc.) to be figured out by anyone. It is a puzzling and helpless situation that inevitably delays the treatment process. The delays could be reduced by providing patients/attendants, relevant, quick, and reliable information. But hospitals can't allocate a part of their limited workforce for this purpose. In the given context, a mobile-based app can play an important role. This paper proposes a new app-based system that streamlines treatment at government hospitals. It reports the general problems faced by patients at government hospitals. It explores the feasibility of a mobile app system, that would provide patients with reliable information, in real-time. The paper finally concludes by discussing the limitations and future scope of the proposed system. The designed app also finds special relevance in the present pandemic situation where every second is critical for the patients. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Designing Mobile App Interfaces for Facilitating Medical Treatment at the Government Hospitals

Toys play an important role in kids cognitive and physical development. Before starting the formal education with alphabets and numbers, the kids learn and understand different phenomena around them by experiencing things through their senses. They learn about different natural objects, creatures and phenomena by touching them or perceiving them through their other senses i.e. through seeing, smelling, hearing or tasting. In this cognitive journey of learning new things, the toys play a vital role. They try to imitate the real creatures and provide the related information in an effective way much before they actually come across those entities. Designing such toys in itself is an insightful experience. The paper discusses the process of developing one such toy i.e. Crocodile toy. And details the process of how different features of the real creature have been integrated to deliver important information about it in an interactive way. The paper concludes with discussion on tentative strategies to evaluate the efficacy of the toy. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems

Design for Cognitive Development of Kids: A Case Study of Developing Interactive Toy for Small Children

Northeast is one of the largest producers of pineapples in India. There are many small fruit processing units located across different northeastern states that process pineapples during peak harvest season. However, most of these units are very small and are engaged in preparing the juice and juice-related items rather than canning pineapple slices. Preparation of juice-related items could be carried with a small capital and space infrastructure. The process of extracting juice starts with peeling the fruit followed by chopping them into small chunks. These chunks are then pulped in a machine, put inside a cloth-like material, and pressed using a hydraulic press. The whole process is so tedious and time-consuming that it is considered a major bottleneck in the smooth operational flow. The paper elaborates on the various aspects related to juice extraction processes. The paper, then, discusses the process of designing an effective equipment for making the overall process of juice preparation easier. The paper concludes with a brief discussion on the subjective and objective assessment of the proof of concept of and the future scope of the research. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Design of Pineapple Peeling Equipment

Engineering education, today, has changed with the evolving job requirements that demands for more than only a domain-specific knowledge. Engineers are expected to address more complex challenges of future that require knowledge from different disciplines. Also, in this era of market competition, the enterprises expect them to come up with innovative ideas to have an edge. Thus, conventional engineering education is going through a transition phase with rapidly changing technology and job demands. Acknowledging this evolving need, many technical institutes have taken the initiative to incorporate creative design education in engineering curriculum to give students a liberal, multi-disciplinary, holistic, and creative outlook for addressing complex multi-disciplinary problems. But, imparting design education to undergrads along with their engineering majors has its own practical challenges. Design education has a subjective and intuitive approach, which involves imagination, reflection, and iteration which is sharply in contrast with the objective technical engineering teaching. Hence, holding the attention and interest of students from non-design background is sometimes a tough task for the mentors. The paper aims at highlighting the problems faced by mentors while teaching design to the engineering UG students at Shiv Nadar University. Based on their experiences, the authors have put forward several insights that might help young mentors interacting with the students with non-design background. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2019.

Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies

Teaching creative design to undergrade engineering students—Some experiences

The present study aimed at investigating work-related pain issues among the workers associated with pineapple peeling activity in small fruit processing units of North East India. The study also assessed the associated levels of ergonomic risk prevalent among the workers and identified ergonomic risk factors associated with pineapple peeling task. A cross-sectional survey was conducted using questionnaire-based interview, pain self-report and direct observation of the activities to understand the prevailing work conditions. Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) was used to assess the level of ergonomic risks involved. Prevalence of pain, in different body parts of the participants, was found evident with a higher percentage of participants reporting pain in shoulders (41.1%), upper arms (37.1%) and lower back (45.7%) while some had also reported of pain in neck (13.2%), lower arms (15.9%), wrists (12.6%) and palm (6%). For RULA, 89.4% of the participants had a grand score greater than equal to 5 which fell under action level 3 indicating for further investigation and changes soon. Hence, various risk factors influencing pain occurrences were identified using logistic regression, and factors like age, gender, hours of peeling, frequency of rest breaks, perceived work fatigue and years of experience, were found to be associated with risk of pain in at least one of the body parts. Identification of these risk factors laid down path for the future course of actions and improvements to address the work pain related issues among workers. Relevance to industry: The study established pain prevalence associated with manual pineapple peeling task and identified the potential risk factors, laying down basis for possible future actions to address work pain related issues and enhance productivity of the workers. © 2015 Elsevier B.V.

International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics

Work-related pains among the workers associated with pineapple peeling in small fruit processing units of North East India

Framing product design specifications is an important part of design process. The decisions taken at this stage affect all the downstream phases, right from conceptualization, embodiment and prototyping to manufacturing and dissemination. In engineering design, to determine priorities of different engineering specifications of product, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method is used. Similar approach was used for deciding upon some design specifications as well. The present study elaborates on a QFD based methodology which helped in deciding an important specification, in the context of pineapple peeling equipment design. Here, a pineapple peeling solution was to be designed for small fruit processing units. During study of the existing solutions, it was found that there were broadly four categories of solutions and final solution was likely to belong to one of them. Hence, specifying the appropriate solution category, prior to conceptualization, was thought to be reducing both, time and effort. The paper, based in this backdrop, presents a QFD based approach used for the peeling equipment design. At first, priority of different user requirement was determined. Then, the relation between these requirements and different solution categories was established. These inputs were, then, put through QFD based process that generated scores indicating an order of appropriateness of solution categories to meet larger users’ priorities. The order of appropriateness, obtained through the methodology, was evaluated through users’ responses. Through this case study, the paper attempts to show proof of concept of the adopted methodology supporting adoption of similar approach for design of other fruit processing equipment also advocates adoption of specific design methods in new design contexts. © Springer India 2015.

QFD based methodology to decide upon contextually appropriate solution category with specific reference to pineapple peeling equipment design

Human muscular strength is extensively used in Indian agriculture for operating various push-pull type farm tools and equipment. Incompatibility between operators' physical capabilities (anthropometric and biomechanical) and demands of physical task to operate tools/equipment often leads to poor performance, low productivity and safety problems. Although anthropometric data are generally being considered, an inadvertent negligence of using strength database for agricultural tools/equipment design is very common in developing countries like India. Therefore, in present paper an attempt has been made to statistically analyze available strength data (pooled and regional/state wise data) of male and female Indian agricultural workers to understand nature of variability of those data in terms of difference between pooled Indian data vs. individual state data; difference between male vs. female data across various states of India; and for determining safe operational force limits for handling various agricultural tools/equipment. Critical evaluation of male and female strength data revealed that there are significant differences (p&lt;0.01 or p&lt;0.05) between mean values of pooled Indian data vs. individual state data for almost all strength variables under study. It has also been observed that average muscular strength of female is significantly lower (in general 2/3rd of male) than their male counter parts across all states. Thus, present study concluded that regional variations and gender variation of isometric strength data are crucial ergonomic consideration for using percentile strength data during calculation of operational force limits for designing various agricultural tools/equipment to be used by targeted user populations from various parts of a country like India with huge ethnic diversity.