A video game design based on Emotiv Neuroheadset

This paper presents our work on the development of a video maze game in Android system, and a new method to play the game using gyroscope and electromyography (EMG) signals obtained by a wireless Emotiv Neuroheadset. The TeamViewer software is used to share the computer screen and to transfer the data to an Android device, and the Emotiv EPOC headset is used to detect the intension of the user who is playing the game. The cursor position is controlled using information from the gyroscope embeded in the headset. The clicks are generated through the users blinking action based on the expressive suite data acquired from Emotiv headset signal data. A program called Neuro Mousecontrol is used to act as a tool for controlling gyroscope movements and clicking actions together. Extensive tests have demonstrated the effectiveness of the developed system

Active lead-in variability affects motor memory formation and slows motor learning

Rapid learning can be critical to ensure elite performance in a changing world or to recover basic movement after neural injuries. Recently it was shown that the variability of follow-through movements afects the rate of motor memory formation. Here we investigate if lead-in movement has a similar efect on learning rate. We hypothesized that both modality and variability of lead-in movement would play critical roles, with simulations suggesting that only changes in active lead-in variability would exhibit slower learning. We tested this experimentally using a two-movement paradigm, with either visual or active initial lead-in movements preceeding a second movement performed in a force feld. As predicted, increasing active lead-in variability reduced the rate of motor adaptation, whereas changes in visual lead-in variability had little efect. This demonstrates that distinct neural tuning activity is induced by diferent lead-in modalities, subsequently infuencing the access to, and switching between, distinct motor memories

Teleoperation control of Baxter robot using Kalman filter-based sensor fusion

Kalman filter has been successfully applied to fuse the motion capture data collected from Kinect sensor and a pair of MYO armbands to teleoperate a robot. A new strategy utilizing the vector approach has been developed to accomplish a specific motion capture task. The arm motion of the operator is captured by a Kinect sensor and programmed with Processing software. Two MYO armbands with the inertial measurement unit embedded are worn on the operator's arm, which is used to detect the upper arm motion of the human operator. This is utilized to recognize and to calculate the precise speed of the physical motion of the operator's arm. User Datagram Protocol is employed to send the human movement to a simulated Baxter robot arm for teleoperation. In order to obtain joint angles for human limb utilizing vector approach, RosPy and Python script programming has been utilized. A series of experiments have been conducted to test the performance of the proposed technique, which provides the basis for the teleoperation of simulated Baxter robot

Disentanglement in conceptual space during sensorimotor interaction

The disentanglement of different objective properties from the external world is the foundation of language development for agents. The basic target of this process is to summarise the common natural properties and then to name it todescribe those properties in the future. To realise this purpose, a new learning model is introduced for the disentanglement of several sensorimotor concepts (e.g. sizes, colours and shapes of objects) while the causal relationship is being learnt during interaction without much a priori experience and external instructions. This learning model links predictive deep neural models and the variational auto-encoder (VAE) and provides the possibility that the independent concepts can be extracted and disentangled from both perception and action. Moreover, such extraction is further learnt by VAE to memorise their common statistical features. The authors examine this model in the affordance learning setting, where the robot is trying to learn to disentangle about shapes of the tools and objects. The results show that such a process can be found in the neural activities of the β-VAE unit, which indicate that using similar VAE models is a promising way to learn the concepts, and thereby to learn the causal relationship of the sensorimotor interaction

Development of Kinect based teleoperation of Nao robot

In this paper, an online tracking system has been developed to control the arm and head of a Nao robot using Kinect sensor. The main goal of this work is to achieve that the robot is able to follow the motion of a human user in real time to track. This objective has been achieved using a RGB-D camera (Kinect v2) and a Nao robot, which is a humanoid robot with 5 degree of freedom (DOF) for each arm. The joint motions of the operatoŗs head and arm in the real world captured by a Kinect camera can be transferred into the workspace mathematically via forward and inverse kinematics, realitically through data based UDP connection between the robot and Kinect sensor. The satisfactory performance of the proposed approaches have been achieved, which is shown in experimental results

Toward the next generation of research into small area effects on health : a synthesis of multilevel investigations published since July 1998.

To map out area effects on health research, this study had the following aims: (1) to inventory multilevel investigations of area effects on self rated health, cardiovascular diseases and risk factors, and mortality among adults; (2) to describe and critically discuss methodological approaches employed and results observed; and (3) to formulate selected recommendations for advancing the study of area effects on health. Overall, 86 studies were inventoried. Although several innovative methodological approaches and analytical designs were found, small areas are most often operationalised using administrative and statistical spatial units. Most studies used indicators of area socioeconomic status derived from censuses, and few provided information on the validity and reliability of measures of exposures. A consistent finding was that a significant portion of the variation in health is associated with area context independently of individual characteristics. Area effects on health, although significant in most studies, often depend on the health outcome studied, the measure of area exposure used, and the spatial scale at which associations are examined

Decreased attention to object size information in scale errors performers

publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Decreased attention to object size information in scale errors performers journaltitle: Infant Behavior and Development articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2017.03.001 content_type: article copyright: © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Autotetraploid Emergence via Somatic Embryogenesis in Vitis vinifera Induces Marked Morphological Changes in Shoots, Mature Leaves, and Stomata

Polyploidy plays an important role in plant adaptation to biotic and abiotic stresses. Alterations of the ploidy in grapevine plants regenerated via somatic embryogenesis (SE) may provide a source of genetic variability useful for the improvement of agronomic characteristics of crops. In the grapevine, the SE induction process may cause ploidy changes without alterations in DNA profile. In the present research, tetraploid plants were observed for 9.3% of 'Frappato' grapevine somatic embryos regenerated in medium supplemented with the growth regulators β-naphthoxyacetic acid (10 µM) and N6-benzylaminopurine (4.4 µM). Autotetraploid plants regenerated via SE without detectable changes in the DNA profiles were transferred in field conditions to analyze the effect of polyploidization. Different ploidy levels induced several anatomical and morphological changes of the shoots and mature leaves. Alterations have been also observed in stomata. The length and width of stomata of tetraploid leaves were 39.9 and 18.6% higher than diploids, respectively. The chloroplast number per guard cell pair was higher (5.2%) in tetraploid leaves. On the contrary, the stomatal index was markedly decreased (12%) in tetraploid leaves. The observed morphological alterations might be useful traits for breeding of grapevine varieties in a changing environment