Dynamical structure of center-of-pressure trajectories in patients recovering from stroke

Contains fulltext : 50308.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)In a recent study, De Haart et al. (Arch Phys Med Rehabil 85:886-895, 2004) investigated the recovery of balance in stroke patients using traditional analyses of center-of-pressure (COP) trajectories to assess the effects of health status, rehabilitation, and task conditions like standing with eyes open or closed and standing while performing a cognitive dual task. To unravel the underlying control processes, we reanalyzed these data in terms of stochastic dynamics using more advanced analyses. Dimensionality, local stability, regularity, and scaling behavior of COP trajectories were determined and compared with shuffled and phase-randomized surrogate data. The presence of long-range correlations discarded the possibility that the COP trajectories were purely random. Compared to the healthy controls, the COP trajectories of the stroke patients were characterized by increased dimensionality and instability, but greater regularity in the frontal plane. These findings were taken to imply that the stroke patients actively (i.e., cognitively) coped with the stroke-induced impairment of posture, as reflected in the increased regularity and decreased local stability, by recruiting additional control processes (i.e., more degrees of freedom) and/or by tightening the present control structure while releasing non-essential degrees of freedom from postural control. In the course of rehabilitation, dimensionality stayed fairly constant, whereas local stability increased and regularity decreased. The progressively less regular COP trajectories were interpreted to indicate a reduction of cognitive involvement in postural control as recovery from stroke progressed. Consistent with this interpretation, the dual task condition resulted in less regular COP trajectories of greater dimensionality, reflecting a task-related decrease of active, cognitive contributions to postural control. In comparison with conventional posturography, our results show a clear surplus value of dynamical measures in studying postural control

Nested aging: lifecycles in the vertical city

No abstract available

Development of a Solid Oxide Fuel Cell for the utilization of coal mine gas

Apart from natural gas there is another important natural source of methane. The so-called coal mine gas is a by-product of the geochemical process of the carbonization of sediments from marsh woods of the Earth's Carboniferous Period. Methane evaporates from the coal and has to be removed out of the active mines where it represents one of the main safety risks. Methane also evaporates in abandoned coal mines. In the federal state Saarland in Germany exists above ground a more than 110 km pipeline for the drained coal mine gas from 12 different sources. The content of methane varies between 25 and 90%, the oxygen content (from air) is in the range up to 10%. This wide range or variation, respectively, of fuel and oxygen content, causes a lot of problems for the use in conventional engines. Therefore the company Evonik New Energies GmbH is interested in using SOFC with coal mine gas as efficient as possible to produce electric power. For that purpose at Forschungszentrum Julich the available SOFC technology was adapted to the use with coal mine gas and a test facility was designed to operate an SOFC stack (approximately 2 kW electrical power output) together with a pre-reformer.This paper presents the results of the coal mine gas analysis and the effect on the pre-reformer and the fuel cell. The composition of the coal mine gas was determined by means of micro-gas chromatography. The results obtained from preliminary tests using synthetic and real coal mine gas on the pre-reformer and on the fuel cell are discussed. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved