Cristina Floriana Pana

Dr. Cristina Floriana Pana

Mechatronics and Robotics, University of Craiova, Craiova, Dolj, Romania
orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

6Years (2021-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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5 June 2025 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
CMCamelia Adela Maican
Camelia Adela Maican
Cristina Floriana PanaCristina Floriana Pana
Cristina Floriana Pana
DPDaniela Maria Pătrașcu-Pană
Daniela Maria Pătrașcu-Pană
Virginia Maria RadulescuVirginia Maria Radulescu
Virginia Maria Radulescu
Fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) in power plant systems is a rapidly evolving field driven by the increasing complexity of industrial infrastructure and the demand for reliability, safety, and predictive maintenance. This review presents a structured and data-driven synthesis of 185 peer-reviewed articles, sourced from journals indexed in MDPI and Elsevier, as well as through the Google Scholar search engine, published between 2019 and 2025. The study systematically classifies these articles by plant type, sensor technology, algorithm category, and diagnostic pipeline (detection, localization, resolution). The analysis reveals a significant transition from traditional statistical methods to machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models, with over 70% of recent studies employing AI-driven approaches. However, only 30.3% of the articles addressed the full diagnostic pipeline and merely 17.3% targeted system-level faults. Most research remains component-focused and lacks real-world validation or interpretability. A novel taxonomy of diagnostic configurations, mapping system types, sensor use, algorithmic strategy, and functional depth is proposed. In addition, a methodological checklist is introduced to evaluate the completeness and operational readiness of FDD studies. Key findings are summarized in a comparative matrix, highlighting trends, gaps, and inconsistencies across publication sources. This review identifies critical research gaps—including the underuse of hybrid models, lack of benchmark datasets, and limited integration between detection and control layers—and offers concrete recommendations for future research. Combining a thematic and quantitative approach, this article aims to support researchers, engineers, and decision-makers in developing more robust, scalable, and transparent diagnostic systems for power generation infrastructure.

22 December 2021 in Healthcare
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
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DCDorian Cojocaru
Dorian Cojocaru
Liviu Florin MantaLiviu Florin Manta
Liviu Florin Manta
Cristina Floriana PanaCristina Floriana Pana
Cristina Floriana Pana
ADAndrei Dragomir
Andrei Dragomir
AMAlexandru Marin Mariniuc
Alexandru Marin Mariniuc
IVIonel Cristian Vladu
Ionel Cristian Vladu
The paper aims to study the applicability and limitations of the solution resulting from a design process for an intelligent system supporting people with special needs who are not physically able to control a wheelchair using classical systems. The intelligent system uses information from smart sensors and offers a control system that replaces the use of a joystick. The necessary movements of the chair in the environment can be determined by an intelligent vision system analyzing the direction of the patient’s gaze and point of view, as well as the actions of the head. In this approach, an important task is to detect the destination target in the 3D workspace. This solution has been evaluated, outdoor and indoor, under different lighting conditions. In order to design the intelligent wheelchair, and because sometimes people with special needs also have specific problems with their optical system (e.g., strabismus, Nystagmus) the system was tested on different subjects, some of them wearing eyeglasses. During the design process of the intelligent system, all the tests involving human subjects were performed in accordance with specific rules of medical security and ethics. In this sense, the process was supervised by a company specialized in health activities that involve people with special needs. The main results and findings are as follows: validation of the proposed solution for all indoor lightning conditions; methodology to create personal profiles, used to improve the HMI efficiency and to adapt it to each subject needs; a primary evaluation and validation for the use of personal profiles in real life, indoor conditions. The conclusion is that the proposed solution can be used for persons who are not physically able to control a wheelchair using classical systems, having with minor vision deficiencies or major vision impairment affecting one of the eyes.

2 July 2022 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
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Cristina Floriana PanaCristina Floriana Pana
Cristina Floriana Pana
Liviu Florin MantaLiviu Florin Manta
Liviu Florin Manta
IVIonel Cristian Vladu
Ionel Cristian Vladu
ȘCȘtefan Irinel Cismaru
Ștefan Irinel Cismaru
FPFlorina Petcu
Florina Petcu
NBNicu George Bîzdoacă
Nicu George Bîzdoacă
For people with amputated lower limbs, it is imperative to make high-performance prostheses that reproduce, as accurately as possible, the functions of the amputated limb. In this case, a preliminary study of the lower limbs from a kinematic and dynamic point of view is necessary. This paper proposes a prosthesis design and a system for acquiring the information needed to determine the stepping phase kinematic and dynamic parameters of the legs. This system consists of a sensory system attached to the legs and a acquisition data unit built around a microcontroller. The sensory system is based on a sensory system for determining the weight distribution on the sole, made of resistive pressure sensors. The sensory system will be subjected to measurement repeatability and homogeneity tests to evaluate and validate the accuracy and error of the proposed solution. The data obtained by the sensory system is transmitted in real-time, via wi-fi, to a computer system for interpretation. After processing and interpreting the data using standard data sets for comparison, the position of the legs, the type of gait and the phase of movement can be determined. Constructively, the system is configurable and can be adapted to any person, male or female, regardless of shoe size.

10 September 2024 in Applied Sciences
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Journal Article
Open access
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IGIlona Andreea Georgescu
Ilona Andreea Georgescu
ADAnica Dricu
Anica Dricu
SAStefan-Alexandru Artene
Stefan-Alexandru Artene
NVNicolae-Răzvan Vrăjitoru
Nicolae-Răzvan Vrăjitoru
EBEdmond Barcan
Edmond Barcan
S(Stefana Oana Popescu (Purcaru)
Stefana Oana Popescu (Purcaru)
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated the adoption of telemedicine and digital health technologies, revealing their immense potential in managing cancer patients effectively. This article explores the impact of recent technological developments and widened consumer perspectives on personalised healthcare and patient awareness, particularly in oncology. Smartphones and wearable devices have become integral to daily life, promoting healthy lifestyles and supporting cancer patients through remote monitoring and health management. The widespread use of these devices presents an unprecedented opportunity to transform clinical trials and patient care by offering convenient and accessible means of collecting health data continuously and non-invasively. However, to fully harness their potential, it is crucial to establish standardised methods for measuring patient metrics to ensure data reliability and validity. This article also addresses the challenges of integrating these technologies into clinical practice, such as cost, patient and professional reluctance, and technological oversaturation. It emphasises the need for continuous innovation, the development of robust digital infrastructures, and the importance of fostering a supportive environment to integrate these advancements permanently. Ultimately, the convergence of technological innovation and personalised healthcare promises to enhance patient outcomes, improve quality of life, and revolutionise cancer management in the post-COVID era.

8 June 2026 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
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Cristina Floriana PanaCristina Floriana Pana
Cristina Floriana Pana
CMCamelia Adela Maican
Camelia Adela Maican
NVNicolae-Răzvan Vrăjitoru
Nicolae-Răzvan Vrăjitoru
DPDaniela Maria Pătrașcu-Pană
Daniela Maria Pătrașcu-Pană
Virginia Maria RadulescuVirginia Maria Radulescu
Virginia Maria Radulescu
Multimodal sensor fusion is increasingly used to improve observability for fault diagnosis and prognostics, enabling Remaining Useful Life estimation in complex mechatronic and robotic systems. Yet, real-world deployments remain vulnerable to sensor faults and data integrity issues—including bias and drift, miscalibration, dropouts, saturation, cross-talk, time desynchronization, and domain shift—which can propagate through fusion pipelines and lead to optimistic validation and poor generalization. These challenges are particularly consequential in safety- and health-adjacent applications such as collaborative robots, wearable/rehabilitation devices, and human-centric mechatronic systems where decisions based on faulty sensing may affect both reliability and user safety. This review synthesizes the state of the art on (i) sensor fault taxonomies and fault models relevant to multimodal fusion, (ii) fault-aware fusion strategies spanning data-, feature-, and decision-level integration, and (iii) how sensor faults and uncertainty impact diagnosis and remaining-life estimators. We will conduct a systematic scoping review of peer-reviewed literature, extracting sensor modalities, fault characterization or injection protocols, fusion architectures, validation settings (simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, bench, and in-field/on-body studies), and reporting completeness. Beyond summarizing methods, we provide practical reporting standards for sensor-fusion-based diagnosis and prognostics, including a minimum disclosure set covering synchronization, fault ground truth, missingness handling, leakage controls, uncertainty calibration, and task-relevant metrics. Reusable checklists and evidence tables are included to support more comparable, reproducible, and deployment-ready research.

7 July 2023 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Cristina Floriana PanaCristina Floriana Pana
Cristina Floriana Pana
DPDorin Popescu
Dorin Popescu
Virginia Maria RadulescuVirginia Maria Radulescu
Virginia Maria Radulescu
Robotic systems for lower limb rehabilitation are essential for improving patients’ physical conditions in lower limb rehabilitation and assisting patients with various locomotor dysfunctions. These robotic systems mainly integrate sensors, actuation, and control systems and combine features from bionics, robotics, control, medicine, and other interdisciplinary fields. Several lower limb robotic systems have been proposed in the patent literature; some are commercially available. This review is an in-depth study of the patents related to robotic rehabilitation systems for lower limbs from the point of view of the sensors and actuation systems used. The patents awarded and published between 2013 and 2023 were investigated, and the temporal distribution of these patents is presented. Our results were obtained by examining the analyzed information from the three public patent databases. The patents were selected so that there were no duplicates after several filters were used in this review. For each patent database, the patents were analyzed according to the category of sensors and the number of sensors used. Additionally, for the main categories of sensors, an analysis was conducted depending on the type of sensors used. Afterwards, the actuation solutions for robotic rehabilitation systems for upper limbs described in the patents were analyzed, highlighting the main trends in their use. The results are presented with a schematic approach so that any user can easily find patents that use a specific type of sensor or a particular type of actuation system, and the sensors or actuation systems recommended to be used in some instances are highlighted.