Fusion of Unobtrusive Sensing Solutions for Sprained Ankle Rehabilitation Exercises Monitoring in Home Environments

The ability to monitor Sprained Ankle Rehabilitation Exercises (SPAREs) in home environments can help therapists ascertain if exercises have been performed as prescribed. Whilst wearable devices have been shown to provide advantages such as high accuracy and precision during monitoring activities, disadvantages such as limited battery life and users’ inability to remember to charge and wear the devices are often the challenges for their usage. In addition, video cameras, which are notable for high frame rates and granularity, are not privacy-friendly. Therefore, this paper proposes the use and fusion of privacy-friendly and Unobtrusive Sensing Solutions (USSs) for data collection and processing during SPAREs in home environments. The present work aims to monitor SPAREs such as dorsiflexion, plantarflexion, inversion, and eversion using radar and thermal sensors. The main contributions of this paper include (i) privacy-friendly monitoring of SPAREs in a home environment, (ii) fusion of SPAREs data from homogeneous and heterogeneous USSs, and (iii) analysis and comparison of results from single, homogeneous, and heterogeneous USSs. Experimental results indicated the advantages of using heterogeneous USSs and data fusion. Cluster-based analysis of data gleaned from the sensors indicated an average classification accuracy of 96.9% with Neural Network, AdaBoost, and Support Vector Machine, amongst others

Infrared Phase-Change Meta-Devices with In-Situ Switching

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the European Phase Change and Ovonics Symposium via the link in this recordWe describe a possible device design approach and an experimental test platform suitable for the realization and characterization of phase-change based meta-devices incorporating in-situ switching and operating at infrared wavelengths. Measurements on such a prototype device working at 1.55 µm are presented.US Naval Research LaboratoriesEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

A behavioural model for integrated phase-change photonics

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the European Phase Change and Ovonics Symposium via the link in this recordThe use of phase-change materials in integrated photonics applications has enabled the development of new types of all-optical devices, including multilevel photonic memories, arithmetic and logic processors and synaptic and neuron mimics. In order to design, optimise and understand the performance of large-scale systems, fast and accurate material and device models are needed. Here we present a behavioural model for phase-change photonic devices that can simulate the write, erase and readout operations in timespans compatible with system level performance evaluation.European Union Horizon 2020Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Memory consolidation in the cerebellar cortex

Several forms of learning, including classical conditioning of the eyeblink, depend upon the cerebellum. In examining mechanisms of eyeblink conditioning in rabbits, reversible inactivations of the control circuitry have begun to dissociate aspects of cerebellar cortical and nuclear function in memory consolidation. It was previously shown that post-training cerebellar cortical, but not nuclear, inactivations with the GABA(A) agonist muscimol prevented consolidation but these findings left open the question as to how final memory storage was partitioned across cortical and nuclear levels. Memory consolidation might be essentially cortical and directly disturbed by actions of the muscimol, or it might be nuclear, and sensitive to the raised excitability of the nuclear neurons following the loss of cortical inhibition. To resolve this question, we simultaneously inactivated cerebellar cortical lobule HVI and the anterior interpositus nucleus of rabbits during the post-training period, so protecting the nuclei from disinhibitory effects of cortical inactivation. Consolidation was impaired by these simultaneous inactivations. Because direct application of muscimol to the nuclei alone has no impact upon consolidation, we can conclude that post-training, consolidation processes and memory storage for eyeblink conditioning have critical cerebellar cortical components. The findings are consistent with a recent model that suggests the distribution of learning-related plasticity across cortical and nuclear levels is task-dependent. There can be transfer to nuclear or brainstem levels for control of high-frequency responses but learning with lower frequency response components, such as in eyeblink conditioning, remains mainly dependent upon cortical memory storage