Quantitative Estimation of Movement Progress during Rehabilitation after Knee/Hip Replacement Surgery

Mobility improvement for patients is one of the primary concerns of physiotherapy rehabilitation. In a typical physiotherapy session, the patient is instructed to perform multiple exercises, based on a specific regimen recommended by the physiotherapist for each patient. The physiotherapist then evaluates the patient's progress based on his or her performance during the exercises. Providing the physiotherapist and the patient with a quantified and objective measure of progress, based on both individual exercises and the exercise set, can be beneficial for monitoring the patient's performance. The quantified measure can also be beneficial when the physiotherapist is not available, e.g., crowded gym or rehabilitation at home. In this thesis, two approaches are introduced for quantifying patient performance. One approach describes the movement timeseries by statistical measures and the other by a stochastic model. Both approaches formulate a distance between patient data and the healthy population as the measure of performance. Distance measures are defined to capture the performance of one repetition of an exercise or multiple repetitions of the same exercise. To capture patient progress across multiple exercises, a quality measure and overall score are formulated based on the distance measures and are used to quantify the overall performance for each session. The proposed approaches are compared to several existing approaches, including sample distribution approaches (two sample kernel), classifier-based approaches (Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines, and Kullback-Leibler Divergence), and dynamical movement primitives. In their original formulation, existing approaches are not capable of estimating measures of performance for multiple exercises. Therefore, the measures of performance for multiple repetitions of the same exercise are estimated using the existing approaches, while the formulation proposed in this thesis is used to estimate the overall performance for multiple exercises in one session. The effects of different variabilities in human motion on the performance of the proposed approaches and the comparison approaches are investigated with both synthetic and patient data. The patient data consists of rehabilitation data recorded from patients recovering from knee or hip replacement surgery, the associated exercise regimen and physiotherapist evaluations of progress. The methods are evaluated quantitatively based on correlation between methods, correlation with exercise regimen difficulty, and qualitatively based on the patients' medical charts. The proposed approaches are capable of capturing the trend of progress for the synthetic dataset and are superior to the existing approaches in presence of multiple sources of variability. For patient data, the proposed approaches correlate moderately with the score obtained from the exercise regimen, and qualitatively correspond with the patients' medical charts. The results indicate that the quantified measures of progress obtained from the proposed approaches are promising tools for supporting physiotherapy practice through monitoring patient progress.1 yea

An Interdisciplinary Account of Martyrdom as a Religious Practice

The role of religious practices in cultural evolution and the interrelations of religious and other cultural practices are the topics of this paper. In that regard, religious and non-religious practices interact in a variety of ways and may be important or necessary for the maintenance of each. The preservation of particular practices by the deliberate manipulation of these interrelations is commonplace. Presumably, the motivation of authorities with the power to manipulate practices is centered on the value of outcomes produced. That value, explicitly or implicitly, is group survival or cultural survival. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the socio-economic and historical conditions which generate religious practices associated with martyrdom. This analysis draws upon interdisciplinary contact between behavior analysis and social sciences such as sociology and anthropology by utilizing concepts of metacontingency and macrocontingency. We address the significance of this interaction to the role of religious practices such as martyrdom in group survival or cultural survival and conclude with a discussion of the challenges facing behavior analysts as cultural engineers

Esquierdo-Leal & Houmanfar (2020)

From a global pandemic to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and others in the Black community, the year 2020 has cast light on long-standing social injustices. With this has come a new social movement and a call for change. Specifically, a call for transformative solutions that address not only new challenges but centuries of systemic issues, such as systemic oppression and systemic racism. Leadership across the globe has scrambled to answer the call, some issuing statements committed to change, others engaging in necessary action. What is critical, however, is that leadership understands the cultural factors that have given rise to centuries of oppressive practices and that they are held accountable for the commitments they have expressed. Leadership must promote, create, and maintain prosocial, inclusive, and healthy work environments. This requires new cultural practices and a focused organizational model. Equally important is the need to resolve ambiguity and communicate effectively, with strategic consideration of constituent perspectives and needs. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the contribution of behavior analysis in addressing systemic oppression as well as the pivotal role leadership communication plays in occasioning social change. It is our hope that this conceptual work will inspire behavior scientists to advance the field of behavior analysis and social movements in the direction of equitable, prosocial change that dismantles systemic oppression

Restructuring Law Enforcement Agencies to Support Prosocial Values: A Behavior Scientific Model for Addressing Police Brutality

Policing in the United States is irrefutably a component of systemic racism. The history of police brutality against the Black community can be found in our amendments, laws, and cultural practices—it is an infrastructure of oppression. Though police brutality is not a new development, it has reached a fever pitch with the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Recent calls to defund the police puts law enforcement agencies squarely, and rightly, in the spotlight of social justice movements and reform. Current issues operating within law enforcement agencies ensure the perpetuation of a system that reinforces the status quo and gives nothing back to the communities that have been victims of brutality. A philosophical restructuring of how law enforcement agencies interact with the communities they serve is paramount. The purpose of this paper is to propose a behavior scientific model aimed at both the individual and organizational levels of law enforcement agencies using elements of Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) and Elinor Ostrom’s core design principles (CDPs), called Prosocial. The Prosocial model promotes clarification of values within organizations and the communities they serve and reinforces values-consistent action. The model therefore has the potential to be a useful tool to combat systemic racism and police brutality within law enforcement agencies. The proposed model will be discussed in the context of those who created it (white academicians), who will be implementing it (law enforcement), and ultimately who should benefit from it above and beyond police brutality and without psychological or financial cost (Black communities)