Effect of overhead drilling support on muscular activity of shoulder

This study examines the effect of an overhead drilling support and position of the arm on muscular activity of the shoulder. Five male participants simulated an overhead drilling task by using a drill in near, middle and far reach positions. Electromyographic measurements were taken from the dominant side anterior deltoid, bicep and trapezius muscles. Root mean square amplitude (RMS) of the EMG activity from these muscles was used to determine the load on the muscular system. The participants used a subjective rating scale to evaluate the overhead support stand and holding position. The results demonstrate that the overhead support stand was effective in reducing the muscular load. The mean RMS value reduction with overhead support stand, when compared to the without support in bicep muscles during near, middle and far reach positions were 18%, 24 % and 47%, respectively. For anterior deltoid muscles the percentage decrease in mean RMS values for near, middle and far reach positions were 24%, 33% and 49%, respectively; and for trapezius muscles the percentage decrease in mean RMS values during near, middle and far reach positions were 32%, 33% and 42%, respectively. The middle reach position, in contrast to near and far reach positions resulted in the lowest RMS values. The mean RMS values without support stand for biceps muscles was the lowest in middle position (0.139mv). Similarly the mean RMS values of anterior deltoid (0.231mv) and trapezius (0.066mv) muscles without overhead support stand were least for the middle position. The mean RMS values for the bicep (0.105 mv), anterior deltoid (0.155mv) and trapezius (0.041mv) muscles with overhead support stand were the lowest during the middle position. The subjective rating results also supported the above conclusions. These findings indicate that workers performing overhead drilling tasks in coronal plane should work in middle position in order to reduce the muscular load

Structural and biochemical characterization of IFT-B proteins

Cilia/flagella are microtubule (MT) based membrane protrusions present on the surface of many eukaryotic cells. Once regarded as vestigial organelles without much functionality, cilia are now acknowledged to play critical roles in many aspects of human development, health and disease phenotypes through functions in cellular motility, signaling and sensory pathways. Cilia exist in many forms and serve a wide variety of tissue-specific functions. Given that cilia do not contain ribosomes and ciliary components are constantly turning over at the tip, proteins destined for cilia are synthesized in the cytoplasm and have to be actively transported into the cilium. Almost all cilia rely on a dedicated transport process called intraflagellar transport (IFT) for assembly and maintenance. IFT involves a multi-protein mega-dalton complex, known as the IFT complex that binds ciliary cargoes and transports them into and out of the cilium. IFT proteins are highly conserved in ciliated organisms ranging from the unicellular biflagellate green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (Chlamydomonas or Cr) to higher eukaryotes including humans. Mutations in IFT genes lead to severe defects in cilia formation and are the primary cause of many ciliopathies (diseases caused by ciliary dysfunction). Chlamydomonas is an important model organism to study ciliary assembly and major discoveries such as the process of IFT, purification of IFT particles and tubulin turnover were made using simple but elegant experiments in this biflagellate. Although IFT is implicated in the transport of major axonemal components such as tubulin and outer dynein arms, a direct link between an IFT protein and a ciliary cargo was still missing prior to this study, largely due to the inadequate characterization of individual IFT proteins. This thesis describes the structural and biochemical characterization of 4 IFT proteins - namely IFT27, IFT25, IFT74 and IFT81 - from human and/or Chlamydomonas

Intraflagellar transport complex structure and cargo interactions

Intraflagellar transport (IFT) is required for the assembly and maintenance of cilia, as well as the proper function of ciliary motility and signaling. IFT is powered by molecular motors that move along the axonemal microtubules, carrying large complexes of IFT proteins that travel together as so-called trains. IFT complexes likely function as adaptors that mediate interactions between anterograde/retrograde motors and ciliary cargoes, facilitating cargo transport between the base and tip of the cilium. Here, we provide an up-to-date review of IFT complex structure and architecture, and discuss how interactions with cargoes and motors may be achieved

Implementation of a person oriented nurse call system using WEKA

poster abstractHospitality is meant to be better three hours too soon than a minute too late. With the increasing population and growing pollution the hospitals tend to be occupied too. Providing best care at the right time is the goal set to all the nurses in hospitals. This can be done by considering lots of facts regarding the patient well known as the context information. Context information is becoming increasingly important in a world with more and more wireless devices that have to be in touch with the environment around them. Maintaining a myriad caregivers for the continuous care had become a hard task and this lead to the emergence of the Electronic healthcare (eHealth) solution. We focus on how this context information can be efficiently modelled by employing an ontology. The eHealth application used is the ontology-based Nurse Call System (oNCS), which assesses the priority of a call based on the current context and assigns the most appropriate caregiver to a call. Decision trees and Bayesian networks are used to learn and adjust the parameters of the oNCS. The two types of nurse calling systems are place oriented nurse calling system and the person oriented nurse calling system. The paper mainly focuses on the difference between the two systems and brings out the best nurse calling system with the simulation results. The ontology was developed by the OWL (web ontology language) and implemented using the machine learning tool WEKA. The ontology can be used by the reasoning algorithms which are based on the context information. Considering the two cases of place oriented and person oriented nurse calling system the comparison shows the person oriented nurse calling system to be much more better than the place oriented. The drawback of the nurse calling systems are well studied by the case studies in both cases. Implementation using WEKA is embedded with the knowledge of database concepts. A database is created by considering all the risk factors of patients and the availability of the nurses and the study shows the average rate at which a nurse can serve the patient as quick as possible. A web service interface was designed which allows the insertion or extraction of new information into the Knowledge Base. Finally the simulation was made to illustrate the advantages and the performance of the new person-oriented approach

Novel approach to copper sintering using surface enhanced brass micro flakes for microelectronics packaging

Copper pastes suitable for low temperature and low pressure die-attach bonding were developed to enable sintering at 275 °C under N2 atmosphere. First, brass flakes were treated with HCl to selectively etch Zn and to realize enhanced surface modifications on the flakes. Then, polyethylene glycol was added as binder to the modified flakes due to its reducing effects on copper oxides and its property to prevent agglomeration. Shear strength of ca. 50 MPa was achieved while sintering with 10 MPa bonding pressure thereby providing suitable, easy and low-cost sintering pastes for microelectronics packaging applications

A General Approach Towards Triazole-Linked Adenosine Diphosphate Ribosylated Peptides and Proteins

Chemical Immunolog