566 research outputs found

    Assessment of Physical Activity in Adults with Progressive Muscle Disease

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    Introduction: Insufficient physical activity is a major threat to global health. Physical activity benefits peoples’ physical and mental health. The general population, including people living with disabilities and muscle wasting conditions, are recommended to avoid excessive sedentary time and engage in daily activity. Adults with progressive muscle disease experience barriers to physical activity participation, including muscle weakness, fatigue, physical deconditioning, impairment, activity limitations and participation restrictions (including societal and environmental factors), and fear of symptom exacerbation. More research is required to understand the inter-relationship between health and physical activity for adults with progressive muscle disease, particularly non-ambulant people who are under-represented in the existing research literature. Accurate measurement of FITT (frequency, intensity, time, and type of physical activity) is vital for high-quality physical activity assessment. The aim of this thesis was to assess the physical activity of ambulant and non-ambulant adults with progressive muscle disease.Systematic review findings identified various measures used to assess physical activity in adults with muscular dystrophy, including accelerometers, direct observation, heart rate monitors, calorimetry, positioning systems, activity diaries, single scales, interviews and questionnaires. None of the measures identified in the systematic review had well established measurement properties for adults with muscular dystrophy.Patient and public involvement interviews highlighted the importance of inclusive, remote, and technology-facilitated research design, the potential intrusion of direct observations of physical activity, the familiarity of questionnaires for data collection, and practical considerations to ensure wearing an activity monitor was not too burdensome.A feasibility study using multiple methods in 20 ambulant and non-ambulant adults with progressive muscle disease revealed satisfactory acceptability, interpretability, and usability of Fitbit and activity questionnaires, in both paper and electronic formats. During supervised activity tasks, Fitbit was found to have satisfactory criterion validity, reliability, and responsiveness and measurement properties were strengthened using multisensory measurement.An observational, longitudinal study that included 111 ambulant and non-ambulant adults with progressive muscle disease showed that:Activity monitoring had satisfactory validity, reliability and responsiveness using Fitbit, but there was considerable measurement error between Fitbit and the research grade GENEActiv accelerometer. Fitbit thresholds and multiple metrics (including accelerometer and heart rate data extrapolations of FITT) were appropriate for physical activity assessment in ambulant and non-ambulant adults with progressive muscle disease.Activity self-report had unsatisfactory concurrent validity, test-retest reliability, and responsiveness with substantial activity overestimation using the modified International Physical Activity Questionnaire. However, self-report properties were improved when used concurrently with Fitbit.Observed physical activity in adults with progressive muscle disease was generally low with excessive daily sedentary time. Activity frequencies, intensities and durations were lower, and activity types were more domestic, for wheelchair users and during the COVID-19 lockdown. Lower physical activity was significantly associated with greater functional impairment, less cardiorespiratory fitness, worse metabolic health, and lower quality of life. Activity optimisation thresholds and minimal clinically important differences were established.Discussion: The implications of this thesis include guidance for selection of appropriate physical activity measures by clinicians and researchers working with adults with progressive muscle disease. Fitbit is suitable in clinical practice and research for interactive, weekly remote activity monitoring or to support activity self-management and may represent an appropriate compromise between potential underestimation by accelerometry alone, and overestimation by self-report alone. A draft conceptual framework for physical activity measurement was also proposed. It includes frequency, intensity, time, and type of physical activity, and incorporates wider aspects of the physical activity construct, including somatic factors (relating to progressive muscle disease and underlying fitness) and contextual factors (relating to personal, social, and environmental situations). Future research will build on the knowledge gained in this thesis, furthering understanding of the inter-relationships between physical activity, health and wider contexts. Implementation will include testing a remote physical activity optimisation intervention that is inclusive of ambulant and non-ambulant participants, featuring Fitbit self-monitoring with a focus on optimisation of daily activity frequency and regularly interrupting sedentary time.</div

    THE HI-FI MAN: MASCULINITY, MODULARITY, AND HOME AUDIO TECHNOLOGY IN THE U.S. MIDCENTURY

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    Hi-fi home audio systems are modular—that is, they are made of a collection of interchangeable components such as turntables, receivers, amplifiers, and loudspeakers. At the advent of hi-fi culture in the 1950s, modular audio systems were marketed primarily to men while all-in-one console systems were advertised in women’s and home magazines. As early as 1952, well-known audio critic Edward Tatnall Canby reinforced this gendered technological divide when he wrote, “Aunt Minnie can run a [console system] and so can three-year-old-sister Jane…Me I’m a hi-fi man of sorts and I want my stuff really separate…The separate-unit system is the thing for me.” In this dissertation, I introduce my concept of modular masculinity, a framework that reveals how post-war technological discourse reflected and encouraged an understanding of masculinity as flexible, reconfigurable, and dynamic. I show how the hi-fi system, with its separate, customizable components, facilitated a range of technological engagement that allowed men to explore and express a variety of masculine roles: moody musician, loving father, dutiful husband, resourceful carpenter, exacting engineer, and so on. Focusing on discourses around loudspeakers, cables, and tonearms, I examine the images and rhetoric around each to contextualize and analyze historic co-constructions of masculinity and sound technology. These case studies center on midcentury magazines such as High Fidelity, Hi-Fi & Music Review, and Audio, as well as archival material including technical circulars, corporate ephemera, engineering notebooks from research labs, patents, and government publications.Modular masculinity is a flexible framework for analyzing the social, political, and economic forces that shaped the ways men engaged with home audio technologies. Gender has never been a simple male-female binary: my framework reveals masculinity as a multivalent formation that develops both in dialogue with and independently from femininity. This study into the discourse surrounding midcentury hi-fi equipment illuminates complex constructions of music technology and masculinity that continue to influence marketing and consumer behavior today.Doctor of Philosoph

    Ti-6Al-4V β Phase Selective Dissolution: In Vitro Mechanism and Prediction

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    Retrieval studies document Ti-6Al-4V β phase dissolution within total hip replacement systems. A gap persists in our mechanistic understanding and existing standards fail to reproduce this damage. This thesis aims to (1) elucidate the Ti-6Al-4V selective dissolution mechanism as functions of solution chemistry, electrode potential and temperature; (2) investigate the effects of adverse electrochemical conditions on additively manufactured (AM) titanium alloys and (3) apply machine learning to predict the Ti-6Al-4V dissolution state. We hypothesized that (1) cathodic activation and inflammatory species (H2O2) would degrade the Ti-6Al-4V oxide, promoting dissolution; (2) AM Ti-6Al-4V selective dissolution would occur and (3) near field electrochemical impedance spectra (nEIS) would distinguish between dissolved and polished Ti-6Al-4V, allowing for deep neural network prediction. First, we show a combinatorial effect of cathodic activation and inflammatory species, degrading the oxide film’s polarization resistance (Rp) by a factor of 105 Ωcm2 (p = 0.000) and inducing selective dissolution. Next, we establish a potential range (-0.3 V to –1 V) where inflammatory species, cathodic activation and increasing solution temperatures (24 oC to 55 oC) synergistically affect the oxide film. Then, we evaluate the effect of solution temperature on the dissolution rate, documenting a logarithmic dependence. In our second aim, we show decreased AM Ti-6Al-4V Rp when compared with AM Ti-29Nb-21Zr in H2O2. AM Ti-6Al-4V oxide degradation preceded pit nucleation in the β phase. Finally, in our third aim, we identified gaps in the application of artificial intelligence to metallic biomaterial corrosion. With an input of nEIS spectra, a deep neural network predicted the surface dissolution state with 96% accuracy. In total, these results support the inclusion of inflammatory species and cathodic activation in pre-clinical titanium devices and biomaterial testing

    Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Analytical and Environmental Problems

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    Designing and evaluating a participatory workplace nutrition intervention to improve the health and wellbeing of blue-collar (construction) workers

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    Background: Construction is an important industry, estimated to employ 7% of the UK workforce and accounting for 6% of the total economic output. A poor state of health and wellbeing of construction labourers has been widely recognised, with workers suffering from a high number of work-related injuries and occupational health problems, including musculoskeletal and lung illnesses as well as poor mental health. In addition, construction workers struggle with healthy food choices due to lack of knowledge, long working hours, remote site locations, poor food facilities on site, and temporary accommodation. Yet, nutrition interventions in construction are rare, with no UK studies.Aim: The study aimed to design and evaluate a participatory nutrition intervention to improve the health and wellbeing of construction workers. Methods: A mixed-methods approach was used and the study included three stages. The first, exploratory phase of the project, comprising the literature review and focus groups with construction workers and managers (n=5), informed and determined the next phases, including the questionnaire development and subsequent intervention design. In the next stage, the baseline questionnaire was distributed (n=51), the intervention was designed using the COM-B model and the Behaviour Change Wheel and implemented on a construction site. In the last, evaluation stage, results from the follow-up questionnaires (n=22), findings from individual interviewees (n=13) as well as an intervention plan, checklists and researcher’s notes were used.Results: Findings from the literature review and focus groups explored construction workers’ nutrition behaviours, identified barriers and facilitators to healthy nutrition choices in the workplace and investigated perceptions of current health interventions, and ways to design a nutrition intervention suitable for the industry. Following the intervention, the questionnaire results showed changes in health and wellbeing outcomes as well as nutrition knowledge, nutrition behaviour and body composition measures (e.g., weight, fat mass, fat free mass, BMI). In addition, data from individual interviews with managers and workers who attended the intervention allowed the evaluation outcomes to be appraised and understood further, in relation to the implementation, fidelity, dose received, dose delivered, reach and recruitment. Conclusions: Overall, this study shows the process of designing a construction industry tailored nutrition intervention in a participatory manner. The findings indicate that despite context related barriers to the implementation, workplace interventions taking place on ‘real-life’ working construction sites are possible and can bring positive changes, at 6 month follow-up

    Elasto-Magnetic Pumps for Point-of-Care Diagnostics

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    In recent decades the development of microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices has accelerated dramatically, revolutionising the fields of microbiology and medicine. However, these systems are not without limitations. Many of these devices are powered by comparatively large and expensive external pumping systems, which limit their widespread applications in areas such as point of care medical devices. As such there is a need to carry out research into miniaturising the pumping systems in order to be integrated directly within the device. The same is true for the reliance on macroscopic sample preparation such as particle filtration. This thesis will focus on a new class of elasto-magnetic pumps and the physical rinciples underpinning their functionality when integrated within microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices, as well as investigating the novel use of herringbone micromixers for particle filtration.Operating Budge

    Fault-based Analysis of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

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    The fourth industrial revolution called Industry 4.0 tries to bridge the gap between traditional Electronic Design Automation (EDA) technologies and the necessity of innovating in many indus- trial fields, e.g., automotive, avionic, and manufacturing. This complex digitalization process in- volves every industrial facility and comprises the transformation of methodologies, techniques, and tools to improve the efficiency of every industrial process. The enhancement of functional safety in Industry 4.0 applications needs to exploit the studies related to model-based and data-driven anal- yses of the deployed Industrial Cyber-Physical System (ICPS). Modeling an ICPS is possible at different abstraction levels, relying on the physical details included in the model and necessary to describe specific system behaviors. However, it is extremely complicated because an ICPS is com- posed of heterogeneous components related to different physical domains, e.g., digital, electrical, and mechanical. In addition, it is also necessary to consider not only nominal behaviors but even faulty behaviors to perform more specific analyses, e.g., predictive maintenance of specific assets. Nevertheless, these faulty data are usually not present or not available directly from the industrial machinery. To overcome these limitations, constructing a virtual model of an ICPS extended with different classes of faults enables the characterization of faulty behaviors of the system influenced by different faults. In literature, these topics are addressed with non-uniformly approaches and with the absence of standardized and automatic methodologies for describing and simulating faults in the different domains composing an ICPS. This thesis attempts to overcome these state-of-the-art gaps by proposing novel methodologies, techniques, and tools to: model and simulate analog and multi-domain systems; abstract low-level models to higher-level behavioral models; and monitor industrial systems based on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) paradigm. Specifically, the proposed contributions involve the exten- sion of state-of-the-art fault injection practices to improve the ICPSs safety, the development of frameworks for safety operations automatization, and the definition of a monitoring framework for ICPSs. Overall, fault injection in analog and digital models is the state of the practice to en- sure functional safety, as mentioned in the ISO 26262 standard specific for the automotive field. Starting from state-of-the-art defects defined for analog descriptions, new defects are proposed to enhance the IEEE P2427 draft standard for analog defect modeling and coverage. Moreover, dif- ferent techniques to abstract a transistor-level model to a behavioral model are proposed to speed up the simulation of faulty circuits. Therefore, unlike the electrical domain, there is no extensive use of fault injection techniques in the mechanical one. Thus, extending the fault injection to the mechanical and thermal fields allows for supporting the definition and evaluation of more reliable safety mechanisms. Hence, a taxonomy of mechanical faults is derived from the electrical domain by exploiting the physical analogies. Furthermore, specific tools are built for automatically instru- menting different descriptions with multi-domain faults. The entire work is proposed as a basis for supporting the creation of increasingly resilient and secure ICPS that need to preserve functional safety in any operating context

    Static and dynamic forces accuracy of a Lightweight Collaborative Robot through impedance control

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    Industry 4.0 has become established, arousing the great interest of curiosities and fears for the impact not yet recognized. Human-robot collaboration is also being given more emphasis since collaborative robots improve safety and flexibility. However, not for all possible applications, the great initial economic effort of these machines may pay off expectations. This dissertation aims to give useful measurements performed on a KUKA LBR iiwa, an advanced collaborative robot. By executing particular tasks, like polishing, it has been noticed that Cartesian forces reconstructed by the robot are not always such accurate as assured by the manufacturer. The goal of this thesis is to compare the measured force by the robot torque sensors with the force measured by an external load cell. The focus is on the Z-axis force, considered the most relevant for the applications considered. For this reason, a commercial mono-axial load cell has been used. In these experiments, both static and dynamic forces were treat

    Brain-Computer Interface

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    Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) with the use of advanced artificial intelligence identification is a rapidly growing new technology that allows a silently commanding brain to manipulate devices ranging from smartphones to advanced articulated robotic arms when physical control is not possible. BCI can be viewed as a collaboration between the brain and a device via the direct passage of electrical signals from neurons to an external system. The book provides a comprehensive summary of conventional and novel methods for processing brain signals. The chapters cover a range of topics including noninvasive and invasive signal acquisition, signal processing methods, deep learning approaches, and implementation of BCI in experimental problems

    Towards a Pantograph-based Interventional AUV for Under-ice Measurements

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    This paper addresses the design of a novel interventional robotic platform, aiming to perform an autonomous sampling and measurement under the thin ice in the Antarctic environment. We propose a pantograph mechanism, which can effectively generate a constant interaction force to the surface during the contact, which is crucial for reliable measurements. We provide the proof-of-concept design of the pantograph with a robotic prototype with foldable actuation. Preliminary results of the pantograph mechanism and the localisation system are provided, confirming the feasibility of the system
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