Gaze-based teleprosthetic enables intuitive continuous control of complex robot arm use: Writing & drawing

Eye tracking is a powerful mean for assistive technologies for people with movement disorders, paralysis and amputees. We present a highly intuitive eye tracking-controlled robot arm operating in 3-dimensional space based on the user's gaze target point that enables tele-writing and drawing. The usability and intuitive usage was assessed by a “tele” writing experiment with 8 subjects that learned to operate the system within minutes of first time use. These subjects were naive to the system and the task and had to write three letters on a white board with a white board pen attached to the robot arm's endpoint. The instructions are to imagine they were writing text with the pen and look where the pen would be going, they had to write the letters as fast and as accurate as possible, given a letter size template. Subjects were able to perform the task with facility and accuracy, and movements of the arm did not interfere with subjects ability to control their visual attention so as to enable smooth writing. On the basis of five consecutive trials there was a significant decrease in the total time used and the total number of commands sent to move the robot arm from the first to the second trial but no further improvement thereafter, suggesting that within writing 6 letters subjects had mastered the ability to control the system. Our work demonstrates that eye tracking is a powerful means to control robot arms in closed-loop and real-time, outperforming other invasive and non-invasive approaches to Brain-Machine-Interfaces in terms of calibration time (<;2 minutes), training time (<;10 minutes), interface technology costs. We suggests that gaze-based decoding of action intention may well become one of the most efficient ways to interface with robotic actuators - i.e. Brain-Robot-Interfaces - and become useful beyond paralysed and amputee users also for the general teleoperation of robotic and exoskeleton in human augmentation

„Nie zatwardzajcie serc waszych...”. Problem sklerokardii w twórczości Wacława Potockiego (na podstawie "Nowego zaciągu…" i "Dyjalogu o zmartwychwstaniu Pańskim"). Część druga: Antropologiczne aspekty sklerokardii

This article is the second and final part of a study devoted to the biblical problem of hardness of heart, present in two works by Wacław Potocki – Nowy zaciąg… (1698) and Dyjalog o zmartwychwstaniu Pańskim (1676). The discourse of the present sketch focuses on issues of an anthropological and moral nature, primarily on looking at the problem of sclerocardia through the prism of relations prevailing between the individual and the group, diagnosing the internal and external condition of the characters affected by the title ‟ailment” (Jews as a community falsely accusing Jesus and demanding his conviction; the chief priests, executioners, Judas, Caiaphas), showing the ways in which individuals and communities affected by sclerocardia behave and perceive reality, as well as the functioning of selected areas of social life (e.g. justice, the judiciary, interpersonal relations, the verbal sphere). Inherent in these themes are issues of human dignity and the ethical, moral dimension of the actions taken by the protagonists and the consequences of their decisions. The entire reflection is aimed at trying to answer the question of what vision of a man affected by sclerocardia emerges from the works of Wacław Potocki discussed here and whether it is coherent or divergent in the case of both works

Association between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptom severity and white matter integrity moderated by in-scanner head motion

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common and debilitating neurodevelopmental disorder associated with various negative life impacts. The manifestation of ADHD is very heterogeneous, and previous investigations on neuroanatomical alterations in ADHD have yielded inconsistent results. We investigated the mediating effect of in-scanner head motion and ADHD hyperactivity severity on motion-corrected fractional anisotropy (FA) using diffusion tensor imaging in the currently largest sample (n = 739) of medication-naïve children and adolescents (age range 5–22 years). We used automated tractography to examine whole-brain and mean FA of the tracts most frequently reported in ADHD; corpus callosum forceps major and forceps minor, left and right superior-longitudinal fasciculus, and left and right corticospinal tract (CST). Associations between FA and hyperactivity severity appeared when in-scanner head motion was not accounted for as mediator. However, causal mediation analysis revealed that these effects are fully mediated through in-scanner head motion for whole-brain FA, the corpus callosum forceps minor, and left superior-longitudinal fasciculus. Direct effect of hyperactivity severity on FA was only found for the left CST. This study illustrates the crucial role of in-scanner head motion in the identification of white matter integrity alterations in ADHD and shows how neglecting irremediable motion artifacts causes spurious findings. When the mediating effect of in-scanner head motion on FA is accounted for, an association between hyperactivity severity and FA is only present for the left CST; this may play a crucial role in the manifestation of hyperactivity and impulsivity symptoms in ADHD

Decomposing the role of alpha oscillations during brain maturation

Childhood and adolescence are critical stages of the human lifespan, in which fundamental neural reorganizational processes take place. A substantial body of literature investigated accompanying neurophysiological changes, focusing on the most dominant feature of the human EEG signal: the alpha oscillation. Recent developments in EEG signal-processing show that conventional measures of alpha power are confounded by various factors and need to be decomposed into periodic and aperiodic components, which represent distinct underlying brain mechanisms. It is therefore unclear how each part of the signal changes during brain maturation. Using multivariate Bayesian generalized linear models, we examined aperiodic and periodic parameters of alpha activity in the largest openly available pediatric dataset (N=2529, age 5-22 years) and replicated these findings in a preregistered analysis of an independent validation sample (N=369, age 6-22 years). First, the welldocumented age-related decrease in total alpha power was replicated. However, when controlling for the aperiodic signal component, our findings provided strong evidence for an age-related increase in the aperiodic-adjusted alpha power. As reported in previous studies, also relative alpha power revealed a maturational increase, yet indicating an underestimation of the underlying relationship between periodic alpha power and brain maturation. The aperiodic intercept and slope decreased with increasing age and were highly correlated with total alpha power. Consequently, earlier interpretations on age-related changes of total alpha power need to be reconsidered, as elimination of active synapses rather links to decreases in the aperiodic intercept. Instead, analyses of diffusion tensor imaging data indicate that the maturational increase in aperiodic-adjusted alpha power is related to increased thalamocortical connectivity. Functionally, our results suggest that increased thalamic control of cortical alpha power is linked to improved attentional performance during brain maturation

Working Memory Training Effects on White Matter Integrity in Young and Older Adults

Objectives: Working memory is essential for daily life skills like reading comprehension, reasoning, and problem-solving. Healthy aging of the brain goes along with working memory decline that can affect older people's independence in everyday life. Interventions in the form of cognitive training are a promising tool for delaying age-related working memory decline, yet the underlying structural plasticity of white matter is hardly studied. Methods: We conducted a longitudinal diffusion tensor imaging study to investigate the effects of an intensive four-week adaptive working memory training on white matter integrity quantified by global and tract-wise mean diffusivity. We compared diffusivity measures of fiber tracts that are associated with working memory of 32 young and 20 older participants that were randomly assigned to a working memory training group or an active control group. Results: The behavioral analysis showed an increase in working memory performance after the four-week adaptive working memory training. The neuroanatomical analysis revealed a decrease in mean diffusivity in the working memory training group after the training intervention in the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus for the older adults. There was also a decrease in mean diffusivity in the working memory training group in the right superior longitudinal fasciculus for the older and young participants after the intervention. Conclusion: This study shows that older people can benefit from working memory training by improving their working memory performance that is also reflected in terms of improved white matter integrity in the superior longitudinal fasciculus and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, where the first is an essential component of the frontoparietal network known to be essential in working memory

"Wink to grasp" – comparing eye, voice & EMG gesture control of grasp with soft-robotic gloves

The ability of robotic rehabilitation devices to support paralysed end-users is ultimately limited by the degree to which human-machine-interaction is designed to be effective and efficient in translating user intention into robotic action. Specifically, we evaluate the novel possibility of binocular eye-tracking technology to detect voluntary winks from involuntary blink commands, to establish winks as a novel low-latency control signal to trigger robotic action. By wearing binocular eye-tracking glasses we enable users to directly observe their environment or the actuator and trigger movement actions, without having to interact with a visual display unit or user interface. We compare our novel approach to two conventional approaches for controlling robotic devices based on electromyo-graphy (EMG) and speech-based human-computer interaction technology. We present an integrated software framework based on ROS that allows transparent integration of these multiple modalities with a robotic system. We use a soft-robotic SEM glove (Bioservo Technologies AB, Sweden) to evaluate how the 3 modalities support the performance and subjective experience of the end-user when movement assisted. All 3 modalities are evaluated in streaming, closed-loop control operation for grasping physical objects. We find that wink control shows the lowest error rate mean with lowest standard deviation of (0.23 ± 0.07, mean ± SEM) followed by speech control (0.35 ± 0. 13) and EMG gesture control (using the Myo armband by Thalamic Labs), with the highest mean and standard deviation (0.46 ± 0.16). We conclude that with our novel own developed eye-tracking based approach to control assistive technologies is a well suited alternative to conventional approaches, especially when combined with 3D eye-tracking based robotic end-point control

Saliency Models Reveal Reduced Top-Down Attention in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Naturalistic Eye-Tracking Study

Objective: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a highly prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder. It is associated with deficits in executive functions, especially in visual attention. Deviant visual attention in ADHD is suspected to arise from imbalances between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms. However, it is unclear which of these mechanisms propels the aberrant visual attention. Method: In 815 medication-naïve children and adolescents (age range 5-21 years), differences in visual attention in participants with ADHD and neurotypical controls were investigated using eye tracking in a naturalistic video viewing task. Two opposing saliency models were used. Finegrained, based on low-level image features, was chosen to estimate bottom-up visually relevant areas. ViNet, a higher-level saliency model based on deep neural networks and trained on the gaze of neurotypical controls, was selected to determine top-down visually relevant regions. Correspondence between gaze and both saliency maps was calculated using normalized scanpath saliency, thus measuring the extent of coherence to bottom-up and top-down relevant contents. Results: Participants with combined ADHD showed lower mean normalized scanpath saliency for the top-down saliency map, but not the bottom-up one, compared with neurotypical controls. This contrast indicates poorer top-down control as a major contributor to impaired visual attention in combined ADHD. There was no significant effect for the predominantly inattentive ADHD group. Conclusion: This study demonstrated the use of eye tracking for differentiating between top-down and bottom-up visual attention. It shows that in combined ADHD, a reduction of top-down visual attention is key to an impaired competition between bottom-up and top-down visual attention

Working memory training effects on white matter integrity in young and older adults

Objectives: Working memory is essential for daily life skills like reading comprehension, reasoning, and problem-solving. Healthy aging of the brain goes along with working memory decline that can affect older people’s independence in everyday life. Interventions in the form of cognitive training are a promising tool for delaying age-related working memory decline, yet the underlying structural plasticity of white matter is hardly studied. Methods: We conducted a longitudinal diffusion tensor imaging study to investigate the effects of an intensive four-week adaptive working memory training on white matter integrity quantified by global and tract-wise mean diffusivity. We compared diffusivity measures of fiber tracts that are associated with working memory of 32 young and 20 older participants that were randomly assigned to a working memory training group or an active control group. Results: The behavioral analysis showed an increase in working memory performance after the four-week adaptive working memory training. The neuroanatomical analysis revealed a decrease in mean diffusivity in the working memory training group after the training intervention in the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus for the older adults. There was also a decrease in mean diffusivity in the working memory training group in the right superior longitudinal fasciculus for the older and young participants after the intervention. Conclusion: This study shows that older people can benefit from working memory training by improving their working memory performance that is also reflected in terms of improved white matter integrity in the superior longitudinal fasciculus and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, where the first is an essential component of the frontoparietal network known to be essential in working memory

Recreational sea fishing in Europe in a global contextParticipation rates, fishing effort, expenditure, and implications for monitoring and assessment

Marine recreational fishing (MRF) is a high-participation activity with large economic value and social benefits globally, and it impacts on some fish stocks. Although reporting MRF catches is a European Union legislative requirement, estimates are only available for some countries. Here, data on numbers of fishers, participation rates, days fished, expenditures, and catches of two widely targeted species were synthesized to provide European estimates of MRF and placed in the global context. Uncertainty assessment was not possible due to incomplete knowledge of error distributions; instead, a semi-quantitative bias assessment was made. There were an estimated 8.7 million European recreational sea fishers corresponding to a participation rate of 1.6%. An estimated 77.6 million days were fished, and expenditure was Euro5.9 billion annually. There were higher participation, numbers of fishers, days fished and expenditure in the Atlantic than the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean estimates were generally less robust. Comparisons with other regions showed that European MRF participation rates and expenditure were in the mid-range, with higher participation in Oceania and the United States, higher expenditure in the United States, and lower participation and expenditure in South America and Africa. For both northern European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax, Moronidae) and western Baltic cod (Gadus morhua, Gadidae) stocks, MRF represented 27% of the total removals. This study highlights the importance of MRF and the need for bespoke, regular and statistically sound data collection to underpin European fisheries management. Solutions are proposed for future MRF data collection in Europe and other regions to support sustainable fisheries management.Institut Francais de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer; French Ministry of Fisheries Management; Greek National Data Collection Programme; European Commission, Data Collection Framework; Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [MF1221, MF1230, MI001]; Norges Forskningsrad [267808]; State Department of Agriculture, Food Security and Fisheries Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania; Interreg IVa 2 Seas; Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs; European Fishery Fund; Government of Galicia [ED481B2014/034-0