Assessment of personal care and medical robots from older adults' perspective

Demographic reports indicate that population of older adults is growing significantly over the world and in particular in developed nations. Consequently, there are a noticeable number of demands for certain services such as health-care systems and assistive medical robots and devices. In today's world, different types of robots play substantial roles specifically in medical sector to facilitate human life, especially older adults. Assistive medical robots and devices are created in various designs to fulfill specific needs of older adults. Though medical robots are utilized widely by senior citizens, it is dramatic to find out into what extent assistive robots satisfy their needs and expectations. This paper reviews various assessments of assistive medical robots from older adults' perspectives with the purpose of identifying senior citizen's needs, expectations, and preferences. On the other hand, these kinds of assessments inform robot designers, developers, and programmers to come up with robots fulfilling elderly's needs while improving their life quality

Additional file 1: Table S1. of TipMT: Identification of PCR-based taxon-specific markers

List of specific pair of primers for in vitro validation. All primers were generated by TipMT using L. braziliensis and L. infantum genomes on “SSR target” mode (R1, R2 and R3) or “Ortholog target” mode (O1, O2 and O3). (DOCX 14 kb

Additional file 2: Figure S1. of TipMT: Identification of PCR-based taxon-specific markers

Real and virtual (e-MPX) gel electrophoresis for SSR (A) and Orthologs (B) primers. Each lane corresponds to the combination of genomic DNA of Leishmania species identified at the top and a mixture of the orthologs (O1, O2 and O3) or SSR (R1, R2 and R3) primers in a multiplex PCR assay. Lb: L. braziliensis; Li: L. infantum; gDNA: genomic DNA; bp: base pair. (TIFF 1741 kb

General characteristics of the <i>T. rangeli</i> genome.

<p>* Excluding proteins of unknown function.</p><p>General characteristics of the <i>T. rangeli</i> genome.</p

Evolutionary history of the Trypanosomatidae family obtained through a phylogenomic approach using (<b>A</b>) the neighbor joining (NJ) or (<b>B</b>) the maximum likelihood (ML) methods.

<p>In the NJ results, the percentage of replicate trees in which the associated taxa clustered together in the bootstrap test (100 replicates) is shown next to the branches. In the ML results, each internal branch indicates, as a percentage, how often the corresponding cluster was found among the 1,000 intermediate trees. The scale bar represents the number of amino acid substitutions per site.</p

Number of gene clusters shared by the <i>T. rangeli</i>, <i>T. cruzi</i>, <i>T. brucei</i> and <i>L. major</i> genomes.

<p>Analyzes were performed using the following genome versions and gene numbers retrieved from the TriTrypDB: <i>Leishmania major</i> Friedlin (V. 7.0/8,400 genes), <i>Trypanosoma brucei</i> TREU927 (V. 5.0/10,574 genes), <i>Trypanosoma cruzi</i> CL Brener Esmeraldo (V. 7.0/10,342 genes) and Non-Esmeraldo (V. 7.0/10,834 genes). A total of 7,613 <i>T. rangeli</i> genes were used. BBH analysis used a cut-off value of 1e-05, positive similarity type and similarity value of 40% following manual trimming for comparison with COG analysis in <a href="http://www.plosntds.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pntd.0003176#pntd.0003176-ElSayed1" target="_blank">[55]</a> generating the numbers in the rectangles.</p

The RNAi machinery is not active in <i>Trypanosoma rangeli</i>.

<p>Western blot analysis of eGFP silencing via siRNA in <i>T. rangeli</i> and Vero cells expressing eGFP. For the Western blot assays, anti-GFP and anti-alpha tubulin antibodies were used. In each blot, wild-type cells (1), eGFP cells (2), eGFP cells transfected with Mock siRNA (3), eGFP cells transfected with EGFP-S1 DS Positive Control (IDT)(4) and eGFP cells transfected with eGFP antisense siRNA (5) are shown sequentially. The experiments were performed in biological triplicates.</p

Synteny analysis between <i>Trypanosoma rangeli</i> scaffolds and organized contig ends of <i>T. cruzi</i>.

<p>The blue lines represent regions of homology between the contigs. Annotated genes and other sequence characteristics are indicated by colored boxes. Arrows indicate sense transcription. <b>A</b>. Comparison between Scaffold Tr 61 (4,000–53,457 nt) and TcChr27-P (794,000–850,241 nt). <b>B</b>. Comparison between Scaffold Tr 115 (136,482–164,482 nt) and TcChr33-S (975,000–1,041,172 nt). Contig ends were oriented in the 5′ to 3′ direction according to the TriTrypDB assemblies of <i>T. cruzi</i> scaffolds. The accession numbers of the annotated sequences in the <i>T. cruzi</i> scaffolds (TriTrypDB) are displayed below the sequences.</p

Representation of the telomeric and subtelomeric regions of <i>Trypanosoma rangeli</i>, <i>T. cruzi</i> and <i>T. brucei</i>.

<p>The two types of telomeres identified in <i>T. rangeli</i> and two others representing the heterogeneity of <i>T. cruzi</i> chromosome ends are shown. The size of the subtelomeric region, which extends between the telomeric hexamer repeats and the first internal core genes of the trypanosomes, is indicated below each map. Boxes indicate genes and/or gene arrays. The maps are not to scale. The <i>T. brucei</i> and <i>T. cruzi</i> maps were adapted from <a href="http://www.plosntds.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pntd.0003176#pntd.0003176-ElSayed1" target="_blank">[55]</a>, <a href="http://www.plosntds.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pntd.0003176#pntd.0003176-MoraesBarros1" target="_blank">[98]</a>.</p

Molecular karyotype of <i>Trypanosoma rangeli</i>.

<p><b>A</b>. Chromosomal bands of Choachí and SC-58 isolates were separated via PFGE and stained with ethidium bromide. The bands were numbered using Arabic numerals, starting from the smallest band. <b>B</b>. Chromosomal bands from <i>T. rangeli</i> (Choachí and SC-58 strains) and <i>T. cruzi</i> (clone CL Brener) were fractioned using a protocol optimized to separate small DNA molecules, revealing the absence of minichromosomes. The brackets represent the size range of <i>T. brucei</i> minichromosomes (30 and 150 kbp).</p