*Proceeding Paper* **Development of Dual Activities with Micro:Bit for Interventions in People with Cerebral Palsy †**

**Ainhoa Molinero-Rodríguez 1,\*, Rubén Carneiro-Medín 2, Carmen Miranda-Duro 1, Laura Nieto-Riveiro 1, Paula M. Castro 3 and Adriana Dapena 3**

**Abstract:** Several studies have shown that video games help to motivate users in different kinds of therapies. Therefore, in this work we developed a tool that includes dual activities for therapy, as well as a data system for the specialist to follow the evolution of the user. The aim of dual activities is to train cognitive and aerobic capacities at the same time. The interaction between the user and the game is made through two Micro:Bits. Once the user finishes the game, the therapist can follow the evolution of the user through some parameters included in the activities.

**Keywords:** cerebral palsy; Micro:Bit; gamification; dual therapies


*2.1.3 Research question and objective*

The research question is:

The research objective is:

The choices made in the process of execution of the study can be justification in essence that the study is one of the many attempts that have been made by authors in order to resolve the SWM related issues, but still, solid waste management is not being handled holistically, this is because most of the cities in Nigeria are still undertaking collection of mixed type of waste [5], while the enforcement of appropriate local/state government treatment system is found missing. Eventually, there are recent advanced issues of MSWM in Nigeria that have not been addressed efficiently so far for the treatment of waste. Hence, this paper also discusses the missing interlinks and loopholes in this regard. In fact, the situation has become severe for most of the municipal authorities as a proper assessment of the SWM is not done before suggesting and implementing the strategies [6]. Therefore, the end of resourceful solid waste leads to unscientific dumpsites without proper treatment of waste. However, a detailed and well-justified

table of the important points from the large and available literature was also investigated, and the following aspects ensure (**Table 1**):

#### **Table 1**

*Justification for SWM stakeholders in solid waste management perspective.*

#### *2.1.4 Who initiates the recent practice?*

The owner of the private liability company claimed that he initiated the practice in two other cities in Nigeria and later opened the company in Kano. In fact, most of the waste disposal companies registered in the study area were initiated by their owners. They first began to enlighten the communities on the need to have clean environments in the course of which they were able to have more customers. For example, one of the companies, a private solid waste enterprise, was given a contract by Kano State government for the collection and disposal of wastes in Kano City and the state government through the ministry of environment issued a circular to the residential houses, informing them of the engagement of the company and on the need for the citizens to patronize it. And in complementing the effort of the state government, these operators also embark on awareness and enlightenment campaigns by advertisement in radios and televisions. This has resulted in having more customers than the earlier envisaged. A recent advance in this regard is that these registered private solid waste companies send questionnaires to their customers to fill, with the sole aim of seeing that they serve their customers better. And once in a while, they organize public meetings with their customers to air their views on aspects of improvement or otherwise.

#### *2.1.5 The management of the waste private company*

It was discovered that the managing director of the other registered private waste firm and the new SW German private company Cape Gate Company (overseer) may also be the owner of these enterprises. In order to promote economic growth and a higher standard of living, the government places a key priority on SWM: minimizing and eliminating the negative effects of waste materials on the human health and environment. In order to save money and prevent waste accumulation, this needs to be done as soon as feasible. As far as operation and maintenance are concerned, the enterprises currently self-finance using bank loans. On-site engineers and sanitation inspectors who have received the appropriate training typically handle waste material recovery and recycling.

#### *2.1.6 The beneficiaries*

Due to the issue of secrecy, as such it is very difficult to find out the number of people served by the operators of the private waste collection and disposal companies, this issue is so rampant among all the waste companies visited by this author. However, the local government areas mostly covered by these operators are Kano Municipal and Nassarawa local government areas. The primary beneficiaries are the end users (waste generators) and the private operators the (SW managers). And this is followed closely by the local and state governments who are also beneficiaries in that these private companies' complements their efforts of achieving a clean environment in Kano metropolis and as well as monetary aspect these private companies must pay to the state government every year as a public liability company.

#### *2.1.7 How long has the practice been in existence?*

This practice started as far back as 1984, but the recovery and recycling aspect started less than a year ago when the then Military Government launched a program titled "war against indiscipline." Lack of environmental sanitation was among the first items attracting severe penalties that included: heavy fines, twelve (12) strokes of cane, imprisonment or both. In fact, most household owners have welcomed the coming of these companies, especially the overseer company that assisted in complying with the rules and regulations introduced under the program from the initial kick off.

#### *2.1.8 Where it is being used and its spread*

Apart from the German company hired by the Kano state ministry of environment. These other solid waste private operators or waste collection and disposal in Kano walled City. There are a few popular ones that are also situated in Kano. These include Rubbish and Garbage Limited, Foundation and Waste Disposal Company (WASCO), and Clean Town Engineering Company (Nigeria) Limited. Most Nigerian cities, including Lagos and Kano, have this technique in place, but it's unclear whether it was introduced there because Kano City's operators claimed it was their own idea [7]. One of the companies, WASCO, however, began its operations in Lagos before relocating to Kano in April 1998. There are few common ones also located in Kano and this include: Clean Town Engineering Company (Nig.) Limited, Foundation and Waste Disposal Company (WASCO) and Rubbish and Garbage Limited. This practice has been operational in most Nigerian cities like Lagos and Kano, but it is not clear


**2. Current Situation in Global Markets**

According to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), sales of various electric vehicles amounted to three million in 2020. Currently, China has the largest electric vehicle market, boasting 1.29 million EVs sold in 2020, which is an 8.3% year-over-year increase and constitutes as much as 40.5% of global sales in 2020 (Figure 2) [12].

**Figure 2.** EV sales' share among cars worldwide, 2010–2020. Source: https://www.iea.org/articles/global-ev-data-explorer (accessed on 10 October 2021).

> By the end of 2020, a total of 10 million electric cars had been registered worldwide. In 2020, electric car registrations increased by 41%, despite a pandemic-related worldwide decline in car sales, which saw global car sales drop by 16% [2].

> It should be noted that in 2020 electric cars were reported to account for 4.61% of total passenger car sales globally. This was, however, mainly thanks to the European market (in Europe, the share of electric vehicles in new car sales in 2020 was 10%); in Norway the share in vehicle sales reached a record value of 75%, that is about 30% more than in 2019 [13]. High shares of electric car sales were also recorded in Iceland (50%), Sweden (30%) and the Netherlands (25%) (Figure 3) [2].

**Figure 3.** Top ten markets for electric vehicles by unit sales in 2020. Source: https://www.iea.org/articles/global-ev-dataexplorer (accessed on 10 October 2021).

Outside China, it is Europe and the USA that account for the largest sales volume. Among the top 10 electric car consuming countries in 2020, there was only one Asian country, i.e., South Korea. Interestingly, in 2020, the European conventional vehicle market saw sales decline by 22%. Yet electric car registrations more than doubled to 1.4 million. This means that the electric car market was clearly immune to the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, the highest sales volume in Europe was recorded in countries such as Germany, France, Great Britain, and Norway. For years, Norway had occupied first place; however, due to the rapid increase in the number of electric vehicles in the country in recent years, the Norwegian market has saturated and demand has decreased (Figure 4) [2,13].

**Figure 4.** Global electric vehicle sales: market share in 2030 (forecast). Source: https://www.ubs.com/global/en/asset-ma nagement/insights/emerging-markets/2021/electric-vehicles-asia-investing.html (accessed on 10 October 2021).

> China is projected to become the worldwide largest electric vehicle market by 2030, based on IEA forecasts of annual sales of 9.61 million of EV. It should be noted that the forecasts do not cover regions such as South America, Africa, and other Asian countries (Figure 5) [14].

**Figure 5.** Electric car models available globally and average range, 2015–2020. Source: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/ assets/ed5f4484-f556-4110-8c5c-4ede8bcba637/GlobalEVOutlook2021.pdf (accessed on 10 October 2021).

It should also be emphasised that electric vehicle sales continue to grow even in the face of the pandemic due to three key factors [15–17]:

Not without significance is the last abovementioned factor, namely the growing number of available models and increasing vehicle range [18]. Until a few years ago, the range of an electric vehicle (BEV) oscillated around 200 km, which made such a car unsuitable outside a city. Now that the average range of this type of vehicle has increased significantly, it positively affects decisions on the purchase of this type of car. In addition, potential buyers also have the option to choose from a growing number of models offered [19].

For the promotion of electric vehicle deployment policy, it is also important that these cars are considered environmentally-friendly. Below is a graph showing the overall environmental benefits of introducing electric cars.

It should be noted that with each passing year the amount of conventional fuel saved increases but so too does the demand for electricity needed to charge the cars. At this point, it should be stressed that for an electric car deployment policy to be considered ecological, it is also necessary to obtain electricity from renewable or low-emission energy sources. Otherwise, electric cars cannot be considered fully zero-emission and environmentally friendly (Figure 6) [20].

**Figure 6.** Electricity demand vs. oil displacement among cars, worldwide between 2015 and 2020. Source: https://www.iea. org/articles/global-ev-data-explorer (accessed on 10 October 2021).

#### **3. Analysis of the Situation in Selected Southeast Asian Countries**

As mentioned before, there are several key countries in the global electric car market at present. Some countries have achieved high sales volume through extensive policy to support vehicle purchase and maintenance (e.g., government subsidies, tax incentives, as well as participation in the construction and upkeep of a publicly accessible electric car charging infrastructure) [8]. It should be noted, however, that a number of countries are not even mentioned in multiple reports and statistics because of negligible or virtually nonexistent sales of electric vehicles (often not exceeding even a 0.1% share in total car sales) [21].

Currently and, as forecasts assume, also in the near future, China will remain the world leader in electric vehicle sales. In Asia, however, unlike in Europe, there are no strong international organizations that would firmly harmonize individual economic processes. Nevertheless, individual countries of Southeast Asia see both bottom-up and group processes for implementing policy to promote electric vehicles [22].

The largest organization of Southeast Asian countries is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Currently, the group comprises 10 countries—Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand (founding members—1961), Brunei (since 8 January 1984), Vietnam (since 28 July 1995), Laos and Myanmar (since 23 July 1997), and Cambodia (since 30 April 1999) [23]. Interest in electric vehicles among the ASEAN countries is growing. However, there is a shortage of accurate statistics related to electric car sales [24]. According to the ASEAN Automotive Federation, a specialized agency that analyses the automotive market, in 2019, the total volume of electric vehicle sales in ASEAN member states was 3.4 million in 2019. However, this number includes HEVs, which are not analysed in this article. Some of the member states have attempted to define desired directions for the development of the electric car market. In the following discussion, the authors of this study present the current and planned achievements in the deployment of electric cars in selected ASEAN countries, as well as in some countries that have also prepared specific policies in this area [25].

When analysing the current situation of the electric vehicle market in selected ASEAN countries, it should be noted that, firstly, access to data is significantly limited, and secondly, market development is at a very early stage (Table 1).

**Table 1.** Sales volume in selected ASEAN countries and countries of the region.

\* Limited access to data from Malaysia, which may mean that it is not accurate between 2017 and 2020. Source: https://www.marklines.co m/en/vehicle\_sales/search\_country/search/?searchID=1701312 (accessed on 4 November 2021).

> As can be seen from the presented data, the highest sales have been recorded in countries such as Japan and Korea (and Thailand from ASEAN countries), the lowest in Philippines and Indonesia [26].

> Due to limitations in access to data, the authors decided to present countries not belonging to the ASEAN group, such as India, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan, since these are countries from the same region characterized by a similar level of development. Therefore, comparisons can be made to a limited extent.

> It is thus worth noting that ASEAN, as an organization promoting cooperation in the region, can build common policies for supporting and promoting the purchase of electric vehicles, taking advantage of the common competitive advantage and the synergy effect.

> In addition, in most of the ASEAN countries, consumers tend to choose alternative versions of vehicles such as two-, and three-wheeled units that are not listed as a typical electric car (Table 2).

> ASEAN countries have different levels of wealth, calculated as nominal GDP and GDP per capita. The level of the most important economic indicator characterizing the level of wealth of a country and its citizens has a significant impact on consumer decisions, including the decision to buy an electric vehicle, which is usually more expensive than a traditional vehicle. The fact that wealth is extremely differentiated in the analysed countries will also undoubtedly affect the tendency of individual consumers to purchase an electric

vehicle. It should be assumed that in countries where GDP per capita is low (Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos), the propensity to buy an electric vehicle will be much lower than in countries with high GDP per capita (Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia). Such inference may be an oversimplification, and the decision to purchase an electric vehicle will be influenced by a number of other factors, which are analysed below [27].

**Country Population in Million GDP Nominal (Millions of USD) GDP Nominal (per Capita USD)** 1 Indonesia 272.270 1,158,783 4256 2 Thailand 69.947 538,735 7702 3 Philippines 110.432 402,638 3646 4 Malaysia 33.358 387,093 11,604 5 Singapore 5.840 374,394 64,103 6 Vietnam 98.328 354,868 3609 7 Myanmar 53.545 76,195 1423 8 Cambodia 15.836 27,239 1720 9 Laos 7.371 2044 2773 10 Brunei 0.461 15,278 33,097 ASEAN in total 667.393 3,355,655 4849

**Table 2.** GDP and GDP per capita in ASEAN countries in 2020.

Source: World Economic Outlook database: April 2021, International Monetary Fund. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weodatabase/2021/April/weo-report (accessed on 1 November 2021).


**1. Introduction**

Silicon carbide (SiC) power devices are promising candidates for energy distribution, as well as for automotive, aircraft, and spacecraft applications, by virtue of their inherent features like high breakdown voltage, low on-state resistance, and excellent high-temperature capability [1].

Unfortunately, such devices often operate under critical conditions with a large amount of heat generation, which may lead to reliability degradation or even to an irreversible device failure in harsh cases. As a consequence, reliable simulation tools accounting for electrothermal (ET) effects are highly desired to define the thermal dissipation constraints and optimize the design of the transistor layout and/or of the cooling system. Such tools must be suited to describe temperature and current nonuniformities, which are often responsible for the safe operating area shrinking of transistors with a multicellular pattern. However, conceiving and developing a viable simulation strategy are challenging tasks due to multiple reasons. Fully numerical 3D ET analyses with device simulators concurrently solving the semiconductor and heat transfer equations are computationally unfeasible. Commonly-adopted approaches rely (i) on the interaction between a circuit simulation program and a 3D thermal-only numerical solver in a relaxation procedure [2,3], or (ii) on the extension of a finite-volume/-element software package to account for the electrical behavior of the transistor with simplified models [4,5]. However, for the specific case of SiC power devices, results can be trustworthy only by using models that accurately describe the key physical parameters and their *non-intuitive*temperature dependences, which are rather different compared to the traditional silicon (Si) counterparts. In addition, regardless of the technology, the pre-processing geometry/mesh construction within the environment of the thermal solver is onerous and troublesome. Lastly, these approaches are very resource-hungry and prone to convergence failures, especially if dynamic simulations under critical conditions have to be performed.

In this paper, an innovative *circuit-based* ET simulation approach is proposed for multicellular SiC power MOSFETs, with the ambition of optimizing the trade-o ff between computational e fficiency and accuracy. The strategy is articulated as follows: (i) the device is discretized into an assigned number *N* of individual cells (each associated to an independent heat source) described with a simple, yet accurate model accounting for the relevant influence of SiC/SiO2 interface traps; (ii) the cell model is implemented with a SPICE-compatible subcircuit; (iii) an exceptionally accurate 3D finite-element method (FEM) description of the device is e ffortlessly obtained through a commercial solver aided by an *in-house* routine; (iv) the FANTASTIC code [6] is invoked, which *automatically* generates a dynamic compact thermal model (DCTM) of the device from the FEM representation, and thus builds an electrical network emulating the power-temperature feedback; (v) such a network is enriched with suitable voltage sources to account for nonlinear thermal e ffects, and the resulting circuit is referred to as *thermal feedback block*; (vi) a *purely-electrical macrocircuit* describing the whole ET behavior of the power device is constructed by connecting the *N* cell subcircuits to the thermal feedback block; (vii) the macrocircuit can be solved by *any* commercial circuit simulator in very short times and with unlikely occurrence of convergence problems. A multicellular 4H-SiC power MOSFET soldered on a direct bonded copper (DBC) substrate and operated under dc, short-circuit (SC), and unclamped inductive switching (UIS) conditions is considered as a case study.

This work extends the preliminary contribution [7], where a fully circuital representation of the SiC power MOSFET was obtained and solved with a similar approach. However, the generation of the thermal feedback block, based on Foster networks, was carried out in a long pre-processing stage involving *N* 3D FEM transient simulations, as well as a procedure to determine the proper number of RC pairs of each network and identify their values; in addition, the thermal interactions among horizontally-far cells were either coarsely described or even disregarded.

The remainder of the paper is articulated as follows. In Section 2, the device selected to test the approach and the experimental setup are described. Section 3 offers details concerning the transistor model used for the elementary cells. Section 4 probes into the ET simulation approach. Results are reported and discussed in Section 5. Conclusions are then drawn in Section 6.


*3.3. The Data Analysis Module*

The Data Analysis module supports search, filtering and analysis of the data stored in each data pond of the Hydria data lake. It provides a powerful yet easy-to-use data manipulation and query mechanism that allows users to formulate queries against the data ponds involving selection, projection, grouping and ordering operations through simple point-and-click interaction and without requiring any background knowledge of SQL (Figure 2). The provided mechanism also contains in-context explanations for the different data analysis elements and provides online help with examples. This functionality is targeted mainly towards users with limited relevant experience. Besides analyzing each data pond, the module also offers data extraction and visualization functionality in a variety of different formats such as histograms, pie charts, (heat) maps, (stacked) bars/columns, area/mekko/bubble charts, scatter plots, and various file types (like CSV/TSV and raw text). The implemented data visualization component involves a three-step process where the user *(i)* defines the type of the chart to be exported, *(ii)* specifies the base dataset by selecting the data pond and the data pond field(s) that will be used to create the chart, and *(iii)* may apply filtering conditions (restrictions) on the chosen dataset.

**Figure 2.** Filter and project records.