Bimanual Lifting: Do Fingertip Forces Work Independently or Interactively?

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.Bimanual coordination is a commonplace activity, but the consequences of using both hands simultaneously are not well understood. The authors examined fingertip forces across 4 experiments in which participants undertook a range of bimanual tasks. They first measured fingertip forces during simultaneous lifts of 2 identical objects, noting that individuals held the objects with more force bimanually than unimanually. They then varied the mass of the objects held by each hand, noting that when both hands lifted together performance was equivalent to unimanual lifts. The authors next measured one hand's static grip force while the other hand lifted an object. They found a gradual reduction of grip force throughout the trial, but once again no evidence of one hand influencing the other. In the final experiment the authors tested whether tapping with one hand could influence the static grip force of its counterpart. Although the authors found no changes in static grip force as a direct consequence of the other hand's actions, they found clear differences from one task to the other, suggesting an effect of task instruction. Overall, these results suggest that fingertip forces are largely independent between hands in a bimanual lifting context, but are sensitive to different task requirements

Sleep in Autistic Adults

A group of autistic adults were involved in the consultation process for this project, and they chose the name of the study – Sleep Focus Autistic. This name arose from a thread on social media that sparked a number of conversations amongst autistic adults on the topic of sleep, all of whom recognised it as a critical issue to explore and understand. Participants discussed their sleep experiences, perspectives and needs by engaging in dialogue with the researcher and with each other

In their own words, in their own photos: Adolescent females' siblinghood experiences, needs and perspectives growing up with a preverbal autistic brother or sister

Thus far very little research has focused on siblings in early adolescent years growing up with an autistic sibling. Adopting a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, 11 typically developing sisters actively collaborated in the study to collect and analyse data as well as disseminate their experiences, needs and perspectives in their local communities. This is the first study to use a modified Photovoice methodology which provided typically developing sisters an active participatory role. The results highlighted the feelings, needs and thoughts the sisters expressed in their role as siblings, friends, but also as students and citizens with a passion for advocacy, and limited support in the community due to unhelpful attitudes of members of their community towards autism. The findings indicated that the current method used can successfully co-generate research findings with family members by ensuring pathways for engaging local community. This is crucial in shifting the balance between vulnerability and resilience in families raising an autistic child. Furthermore, when knowledge about the lived experience is drawn directly from the perspective of the actual people (siblings) involved in the phenomenon (siblinghood and autism), a more appropriate, responsive and need-fulfilling strategy of supportive and proactive support systems can be initiated

Low power general purpose loop acceleration for NDP applications

Modern processor architectures face a throughput scaling problem as the performance bottleneck shifts from the core pipeline to the data transfer operations between the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and the processor chip. To address such issue researchers have proposed the near-data processing (NDP) paradigm in which the instruction execution is moved to the DRAM die thus, lowering the data movement between the processor and the DRAM. Previous NDP works focus on specific application types and thus the general purpose application execution paradigm is neglected. In this work we propose an NDP methodology for low power general purpose loop acceleration. For this reason we design and implement a hardware loop accelerator from the ground up to improve the throughput and lower the power consumption of general purpose loops. We adopt a novel loop scheduling approach which enables the loop accelerator to take advantage of the dataflow parallelism of the executing loop and we implement our design on the logic layer of a hybrid memory cube (HMC) DRAM. Post-layout simulations demonstrate an average speedup factor of 20.5x when executing kernels from various scientific fields while the energy consumption is reduced by a factor of 9.3x over the host CPU execution

A retrospective investigation on age and gender differences of injuries in DanceSport

In spite of the extensive research on incidence site and type of injury in ballet and modern dancers, limited studies on injury in DanceSport have been reported. Therefore, this study determined retrospectively (within last 12 months) incidence, severity, site and type of injury, between gender and age-class in DanceSport. Participants were 97 international sport-dancers (female, 41; male, 56). Sixty-six (69%) dancers reported 96 injuries (1.00 (range = 4)) injuries per dancer) and an injury incidence of 1.7 (range = 14) per 1000 h. Females revealed significantly higher median injury incidence (females, 2.6 (range = 14); males, 1.9 (range = 9), p 0.05) than males. A total of 61.5% of all injuries recorded were traumatic with a significant gender difference (Wald chi-square = 11.616, df = 1, p 0.01). Injury severity was 3 (range 240) days with an interaction effect between gender and age-class (Wald chi-square = 251.374, df = 3, p 0.001). Meanwhile, 72.3% of the dancers reported not including sport specific exercises besides dancing. These findings show gender and age-class differences in injury incidence, type and severity. Therefore, to reduce the likelihood of injuries, the implementation of supplemental DanceSport specific exercises that also considers the gender and age-class anatomical, functional, and choreographic demand differences in the training program should be recognized

Carpal tunnel syndrome due to an atypical deep soft tissue leiomyoma: The risk of misdiagnosis and mismanagement

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Leiomyomas of the deep soft tissue are quite uncommon and occur even more rarely in upper extremity.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A 32-year old manual laborer man presented with a two-year history of numbness, tingling and burning pain in the palmar surface of the left hand and fingers. His medical history was unremarkable and no trauma episode was reported. According to the clinical examination and the result of median nerve conduction study (NCS) the diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome was established. Operative release of the transverse carpal ligament was subsequently performed but the patient experienced only temporary relief of his symptoms. MRI examination revealed a deep palmary located mass with well-defined margins and ovoid shape. Intraoperatively, the tumor was in continuity with the flexor digitorum superficialis tendon of the middle finger causing substantial compression to median nerve. Histopathological findings of the resected mass were consistent with leiomyoma. After two years the patient was pain-free without signs of tumor recurrence.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Despite the fact that reports on deep soft tissue leiomyoma are exceptional, this tumor had to be considered as differential diagnosis in painful non-traumatic hand syndromes especially in young patients.</p

Inferring Activities from Social Media Data

Social media produce an unprecedented amount of information that can be extracted and used in transportation research, with one of the most promising areas being the inference of individuals’ activities. Whereas most studies in the literature focus on the direct use of social media data, this study presents an efficient framework that follows a user-centric approach for the inference of users’ activities from social media data. The framework was applied to data from Twitter, combined with inferred data from Foursquare that contains information about the type of location visited. The users’ data were then classified with a density-based spatial classification algorithm that allows for the definition of commonly visited locations, and the individual-based data were augmented with the known activity definition from Foursquare. On the basis of the known activities and the Twitter text, a set of classification algorithms was applied for the inference of activities. The results are discussed according to the types of activities recognized and the classification performance. The classification results allow for a wide application of the framework in the exploration of the activity space of individuals

A time-motion analysis of turns performed by highly ranked Viennese waltz dancers

Twenty-four dance couples performing at the 2011 IDSF (International DanceSport Federation) International Slovenia Open were divided into two groups: the first twelve placed couples (top ranked) and the last twelve placed couples (lower ranked). Video recordings were processed automatically using computer vision tracking algorithms under operator supervision to calculate movement parameters. Time and speed of movement were analysed during single natural (right) and reverse (left) turns performed during the Viennese waltz. Both top and lower ranked dancers tended to perform similar proportionate frequencies of reverse (≈ 35%) and natural (≈ 65%) turns. Analysis of reverse turns showed that the top ranked dancers performed less turns on a curved trajectory (16%) than the lower ranked dancers (33%). The top ranked couples performed all turns at similar speeds (F = 1.31, df = 3, p = 0.27; mean = 2.09m/s) all of which were significantly quicker than the lower ranked couples (mean = 1.94m/s), the greatest differences found for reverse turns (12.43% faster for curved trajectories, 8.42% for straight trajectories). This suggests that the ability to maintain a high speed in the more difficult turns, particularly the reverse turns on a curved trajectory, results in the overall dance appearing more fluent as the speed of movement does not fluctuate as much. This aspect of performance needs to be improved by lower ranked dancers if they wish to improve rating of their performance. Future research should determine which factors relate to the speed of turns

The Moderating Role of Parental Sleep Knowledge on Children with Developmental Disabilities and Their Parents’ Sleep

Background: Children with intellectual and developmental difficulties often experience sleep problems, which in turn may impact parental sleep patterns. This study explored the role of parental sleep knowledge as a moderator on the relationship between child sleep and parental sleep impairment. Methods: 582 parents or caregivers (92.6% mothers) of children with different developmental disabilities (Age M = 9.34, 29.5% females) such as Down’s syndrome, participated in an online survey. Multiple regression analysis was conducted. Results: Parental sleep knowledge of child sleep was a moderating variable in the relationship between child sleep nocturnal duration and parental sleep impairment. Although overall, sleep knowledge was high in this sample, two specific knowledge gaps were identified namely child sleep duration requirements, and the recognition of signs of a well-rested child. Conclusion: This study has provided evidence that increased parental sleep knowledge can positively impact both child and parental sleep outcomes