On-field deployment and validation for wearable devices

Wearable sensors are an important tool in the study of head acceleration events and head impact injuries in sporting and military activities. Recent advances in sensor technology have improved our understanding of head kinematics during on-field activities; however, proper utilization and interpretation of data from wearable devices requires careful implementation of best practices. The objective of this paper is to summarize minimum requirements and best practices for on-field deployment of wearable devices for the measurement of head acceleration events in vivo to ensure data evaluated are representative of real events and limitations are accurately defined. Best practices covered in this document include the definition of a verified head acceleration event, data windowing, video verification, advanced post-processing techniques, and on-field logistics, as determined through review of the literature and expert opinion. Careful use of best practices, with accurate acknowledgement of limitations, will allow research teams to ensure data evaluated is representative of real events, will improve the robustness of head acceleration event exposure studies, and generally improve the quality and validity of research into head impact injuries

On-Field Deployment and Validation for Wearable Devices

Wearable sensors are an important tool in the study of head acceleration events and head impact injuries in sporting and military activities. Recent advances in sensor technology have improved our understanding of head kinematics during on-field activities; however, proper utilization and interpretation of data from wearable devices requires careful implementation of best practices. The objective of this paper is to summarize minimum requirements and best practices for on-field deployment of wearable devices for the measurement of head acceleration events in vivo to ensure data evaluated are representative of real events and limitations are accurately defined. Best practices covered in this document include the definition of a verified head acceleration event, data windowing, video verification, advanced post-processing techniques, and on-field logistics, as determined through review of the literature and expert opinion. Careful use of best practices, with accurate acknowledgement of limitations, will allow research teams to ensure data evaluated is representative of real events, will improve the robustness of head acceleration event exposure studies, and generally improve the quality and validity of research into head impact injuries

"La Questione Romantica" Special Issue: Edward Rushton’s Bicentenary - Cultural History/Legacy

Tis double-volume, special issue of La Questione Romantica brings to completion a process of historical and literary recovery that began a good number of years ago. In due course, thanks to a laborious and wonderfully collaborative effort, scholars from the international scientific community and from across a variety of disciplines have been brought together, as well as artists and the local community of Liverpool, to re-appropriate and celebrate the long-silenced and enthralling legacy of Romantic-era labouring-class poet, committed intellectual and political activist Edward Rushton (1756-1814). The multi-focal project on the occasion of Rushton’s Bicentennial Anniversary in November 2014 involved many individuals and institutions. A partnership of Liverpool Museums, third sector organization DaDaFest, and the Universities of Liverpool and Bari, created a series of three coordinated exhibitions, which were hosted at the International Slavery Museum, the Museum of Liverpool and the Victoria Gallery & Museum, with the financial support of Heritage Lottery Funding;1 the Bicentennial Conference ‘Edward Rushton and Romantic Liverpool’ was co-organized by the University of Liverpool and the University of Bari, with the collaboration of the University of Bologna, and the involvement of two Research Centres – Eighteenth-Century Worlds at Liverpool and Centro Interuniversitario per lo Studio del Romanticismo at Bologna/Bari. The editors of this special issue – Paul Baines, in his turn, the scrupulous and penetrating editor of the first modern edition of The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton (Liverpool University Press 2014) and Greg Lynall at the University of Liverpool, together with Lilla Maria Crisafulli and myself – have all been actors in the process, alongside Alex Robinson, who contributes an essay to this volume, and for whose role we all owe her special thanks. Our collaboration also extended in time and scope, to encompass the artistic project of Unsung, the splendid play based on Rushton’s life by John Graham Davies and James Quinn, directed by Chuck Mike, which premiered at the Everyman Playhouse on 9 March 2016, and a taste of which is included in the Poet’s Corner for this volume. From a purely scholarly point of view, our work has been directed towards activating two different processes – recovering and uncovering Edward Rushton. The construction of the first modern edition embracing virtually all the writings of a forgotten hero – to evoke here the appropriate title of Bill Hunter’s militant vindication of Rushton [Hunter 2002] – implies, quite evidently, a laborious and painstaking process of recovery, which is no less concrete and physical than immaterial and intellectual – given the fragility and, sometimes, the tenuousness of the connections ‘under construction’, as it were. All we had originally was the printed text – which, literarily if not literally, exploded, uncovering an extraordinary wealth of ramifications, disseminated throughout the conceivable range of publishing venues marking out late eighteenth-century print culture. These include broadsides, individual chapbooks and pamphlets, anonymous or acknowledged reprinting in anthologies and chapbooks, cross-references in the form of intertextual poetic dialogue, and – most importantly – newspapers, particularly located in the new-born nation the United States. The same process, indeed, has also occurred in the exercise of criticism – which is the intellectual locus par excellence for the uncovering of increasingly complex layers of meaning; intense intellectual associations; and delicate language constructions. Recovering and uncovering Edward Rushton as a remarkably complex poetic voice and a committed intellectual, fully immersed in the Age of Revolution, has been our scholarly task throughout, underlying the Bicentennial Celebrations, and the Conference, too. This is also the task attending labouring-class poetry scholarship as a whole, which has been directed, in John Goodridge’s words, introducing the online Database of Labouring-Class Poets (1700-1900), to «discover and recover […] an important and extensive tradition that has been hidden or marginalised» [Goodridge, accessed 30.12.2016]. The phase of recovery – intended as sheer accessibility to writers and their work – has now been substantially advanced thanks to the combined impact of the amazing Database of Labouring-Class Poets, the landmark multi-volume Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Labouring Class Poetry anthologies of the early 2000s, the expanding digitization of rare material, as well as the increasing number of new, scholarly editions of individual writers and the emergent experimentation in the Digital Humanities methodologies and instruments. On the other hand, as John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan point out in their Introduction to the forthcoming Cambridge History of British Working Class Literature, the recovery process entails more than rendering the material that had previously been erased accessible. It implies engaging in the construction of increasingly complex, systemic frames for recognizing and interpreting the phenomena that are under our lens. This special issue of La Questione Romantica does engage in that complexity, tracing numerous possible trajectories that help refine both our knowledge and awareness of Edward Rushton’s contribution as a poet and as a politically committed individual, and the intricacies of the worlds that were being shaped in the ‘there and then’ of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Liverpool, no less than his enduring legacy for the ‘here and now’ of our times

Feed-Forward Propagation of Temporal and Rate Information between Cortical Populations during Coherent Activation in Engineered In Vitro Networks

Transient propagation of information across neuronal assembles is thought to underlie many cognitive processes. However, the nature of the neural code that is embedded within these transmissions remains uncertain. Much of our understanding of how information is transmitted among these assemblies has been derived from computational models. While these models have been instrumental in understanding these processes they often make simplifying assumptions about the biophysical properties of neurons that may influence the nature and properties expressed. To address this issue we created an in vitro analog of a feed-forward network composed of two small populations (also referred to as assemblies or layers) of living dissociated rat cortical neurons. The populations were separated by, and communicated through, a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) device containing a strip of microscale tunnels. Delayed culturing of one population in the first layer followed by the second a few days later induced the unidirectional growth of axons through the microtunnels resulting in a primarily feed-forward communication between these two small neural populations. In this study we systematically manipulated the number of tunnels that connected each layer and hence, the number of axons providing communication between those populations. We then assess the effect of reducing the number of tunnels has upon the properties of between-layer communication capacity and fidelity of neural transmission among spike trains transmitted across and within layers. We show evidence based on Victor-Purpura’s and van Rossum’s spike train similarity metrics supporting the presence of both rate and temporal information embedded within these transmissions whose fidelity increased during communication both between and within layers when the number of tunnels are increased. We also provide evidence reinforcing the role of synchronized activity upon transmission fidelity during the spontaneous synchronized network burst events that propagated between layers and highlight the potential applications of these MEMs devices as a tool for further investigation of structure and functional dynamics among neural populations

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Studies of psychiatric disorders have traditionally focused on emotional symptoms such as depression, anxiety and hallucinations. However, poorly controlled cognitive deficits are equally prominent and severely compromise quality of life, including social and professional integration. Consequently, intensive efforts are being made to characterize the cellular and cerebral circuits underpinning cognitive function, define the nature and causes of cognitive impairment in psychiatric disorders and identify more effective treatments. Successful development will depend on rigorous validation in animal models as well as in patients, including measures of real-world cognitive functioning. This article critically discusses these issues, highlighting the challenges and opportunities for improving cognition in individuals suffering from psychiatric disorders