Development of an intelligent object for grasp and manipulation research

Kõiva R, Haschke R, Ritter H. Development of an intelligent object for grasp and manipulation research. Presented at the ICAR 2011, Tallinn, Estonia.In this paper we introduce a novel device, called iObject, which is equipped with tactile and motion tracking sensors that allow for the evaluation of human and robot grasping and manipulation actions. Contact location and contact force, object acceleration in space (6D) and orientation relative to the earth (3D magnetometer) are measured and transmitted wirelessly over a Bluetooth connection. By allowing human-human, human-robot and robot-robot comparisons to be made, iObject is a versatile tool for studying manual interaction. To demonstrate the efficiency and flexibility of iObject for the study of bimanual interactions, we report on a physiological experiment and evaluate the main parameters of the considered dual-handed manipulation task

Meditsiin on-line

The adaptation of information technology to everyday clinical practices coincided with the emergence of online databases, personal medical history and institutional information websites. One of the central issues in online medicine is source credibility. This paper overviews the types and communication of online medical information that have changed the logistics of doctor-patient communication. Inter-doctor communication also benefits from the possibilities for professional communication, and application of multiprofessional knowledge; it helps shape and unify professional terms and nomenclature, guarantees the confidentiality and security of data, while providing easy management of high-quality data; makes provisions for knowledge management and ambulatory e-services.The paper overviews the information portal Kliinik.ee (www.kliinik.ee, OÜ Tervisenõuanne) which shares medical information made available by medical professionals for non-medics, mostly for patients. The portal offers a range of e-medicine services, such as responses by specialists, psychologists, pharmacists. The Communication groups offer the patients free medical advice, feedback, a second opinion to their treatment scheme, as well as an opportunity to share knowledge and their personal experiences, and receive emotional support. Writing therapy is becoming increasingly popular and has spontaneously moved online. Today, there are discussion forums available for people suffering from diabetes, cancer and other serious (or incurable) medical problems. The Internet is in manyrespects advantageous for this type of therapy: it provides an opportunity to establish a dialogue with others with a similar condition while protecting one’s privacy and anonymity. Medical professionals post comments under their own names which gives them credibility.Seeking medical help at an institutional site from practising doctors makes the language use and attitudes of the online forum official, polite and serious. A closer look at the construction and vocabulary of the doctor-patient communication act reveals that the most common features are formality and distancing – the partners are not equal in their sociopolitical standing. Inter-patient discussion groups are more varied in their style of communication and language use, ranging from informational notices to narratives and displays of emotion. A discussion concerning a visit to a folk healer is treated at more length. Interaction of this kind is a discussion that preserves the individual characteristics of many people in writing. Opinions are individualised, making the discussion similar to oral dialogue in which different strategies are used in reasoning. The posted messages reflect natural personal language use in forms ranging from informational notices to lengthy narratives. The general attitude is supportive and trusting towards official medicine and the personal reactions to social and situational events. A medical discussion board comprises a conditional group that does not form a network or community but engages in a dialogue to obtain and provide expert opinion. Users of patients’ discussion group and their narratives have a close connection to reality. The Internet offers the users new ways to share their practices and experiences and sometimes supports or even provides alternatives not available in offline reality. Such groups are based on information sharing and narratives and play an important role in maintaining emotional stability

Slovaki (ja natuke läti) folkloristikast konverentsikülalise pilguga

On October 23.-26, 2002 the international conference Traditional Culture as a Part of Cultural heritage of Europe. Presence and perspective of Folklore and Folkloristics, was held in Bratislava, Slovakia. Interdisciplinary questions on folklore and folklorism brought together folklorists from Slovakia, Norway, Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Chekhia, Austria, etc

The Contemporary Museum as a Site for Displaying Values

Museums constitute an important cultural and social resource. The main objective of museums is making certain objects in the collection visible or, on the contrary, leaving them invisible. In contemporary society the institution serves many important roles, being a place for displaying historical and contemporary values, an institution for preserving and displaying personal and collective memory, cultural values, for collecting tangible and intangible values, an institution for creating identity and ethnic kudos, a work place, an educational environment, a framework for promoting ethnic handicraft and art, a place for integrating different folklore festivals, exhibitions, shows; they are connected to tourism patterns and museum business. The article reflects the changes in the development of museums in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, focusing on the main key words being multifunctional museum, the museum as an open classroom, presentation of tangible and intangible history, the relation and mergence of permanent and temporary exhibitions. The issues of digitalization and preservation and the role of the exhibition curator and the person represented on displays have increased in the museology of the past few decades. The museums’ tradition of self-replication and an increased interest in museological anthropology indicate that museums fulfil an important role in society

The Theme of the Exodus in Russian Folklore: The “Pharaoh” Mythical Creatures, According to the Archive of the Estonian Literary Museum

In this article, we will consider the Russian folklore retellings of the Exodus, with special emphasis on the narratives about mythical creatures called “pharaohs”. The current analysis is based on a Russian collection of folklore. The data were collected in the 1920–‘40s in the territories of Estonia, Russia, and Latvia (Lutsi region, Estonian settlement) in the context of Slavic belief systems and legends about these characters. Currently, folklore materials are stored in the archive collection of the Estonian Literary Museum (ELM) (Tartu), and in the Skriptoorium. The article gives an overview of the most characteristic motifs, the origin, appearance, and habitat of these mythical creatures. The actions of the Pharaohs are described in more detail

The Treasure-bearer in East Slavic and Finno-Ugric Contexts

The goal of this article is to conduct comparative and structural-semantic research into belief narratives concerning flying serpents and treasure-bearers in East Slavic (Belarusian, Estonian Russian, other Slavic traditions) and Finno-Ugric (Estonian, Votic, Livonian, Finnish, Vepsian) regions related to Baltic and Scandinavian beliefs. The source material was collected between the 19th and 21st centuries. Based on the available materials, a character profile was created with respect to the following features while describing a flying serpent and a treasure-bringer: description of the origin (how and from whom the supernatural being originates), general forms of appearance, aspects of time and location, as well as the creature’s behaviour (active/passive; rituals) and genre affiliation (the process of storytelling, perception of the character).Namen tega članka je primerjalna in stukturalno-semantična raziskava narativov verovanja v leteče kače in zakladonoše na vzhodnoslovanskih (beloruskih, estonsko ruskih, drugih slovanskih) in ugrofinskih (estonskih, votskih, livonskih, finskih, vepskih) območjih ter povezanosti teh narativov z baltskimi in skandinavskimi verovanji. Gradivo je bilo zbrano med 19. in 21. stoletjem. Sodeč iz razpoložljivega gradiva, je bil lik ustvarjen z opisovanjem lastnosti leteče kače in zakladonoše: izvora (kako se je nadnaravno bitje rodilo in kdo ga je rodil), splošnih pojavnih oblik, časovnih in krajevnih vidikov, obnašanja (aktivno/pasivno; obredi) in žanrske pripadnosti (proces pripovedovanja zgodb, percepcija lika)

Online natural myocontrol of combined hand and wrist actions using tactile myography and the biomechanics of grasping

Connan M, Kõiva R, Castellini C. Online natural myocontrol of combined hand and wrist actions using tactile myography and the biomechanics of grasping. Frontiers in Neurorobotics. 2020;14: 11.Objective: Despite numerous recent advances in the field of rehabilitation robotics, simultaneous and proportional control of hand and/or wrist prostheses is still unsolved. In this work we concentrate on myocontrol of combined actions, for instance power grasping while rotating the wrist, by only using training data gathered from single actions. This is highly desirable since gathering data for all possible combined actions would be unfeasibly long and demanding for the amputee. Approach: We first investigated physiologically feasible limits for muscle activation during combined actions. Using these limits we involved 12 intact participants and one amputee in a Target Achievement Control test, showing that tactile myography, i.e. high-density force myography, solves the problem of combined actions to a remarkable extent using simple linear regression. Since real-time usage of many sensors can be computationally demanding, we compare this approach with another one using a reduced feature set. These reduced features are obtained using a fast, spatial first-order approximation of the sensor values. Main results: By using the training data of single actions only, i.e. power grasp or wrist movements, subjects achieved an average success rate of 70.0% in the target achievement test using ridge regression. When combining wrist actions, e.g. pronating and flexing the wrist simultaneously, similar results were obtained with an average of 68.1%. If a power grasp is added to the pool of actions, combined actions are much more difficult to achieve (36.1%). Significance: To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, the effectiveness of tactile myography on single and combined actions is evaluated in a target achievement test. The present study includes 3 DoFs control instead of the two generally used in the literature. Additionally, we define a set of physiologically plausible muscle activation limits valid for most experiments of this kind

Äksi nõid – nõukogude aja selgeltnägija

This article is about the constellations in which communities accept extraordinary personalities and the traditional clairvoyant/witchcraft narratives. The person under discussion is the witch of Äksi, Hermine Elisabeth Jürgens (1892–1976), one of the best known Estonian 20th-century clairvoyants. In Estonian, the word nõid (‘witch’) is still used by the general public (a witch is a person with extraordinary powers, a healer, a wise(wo)man). During the Soviet period and also later, the term nõid was construed as an important keeper and interpreter of national knowledge. The article focuses on the life of the witch of Äksi and the corpus of narratives that talk about her, discussing the most common subtopics of narratives and motifs that have led to the folklorisation or narrativisation of her life. The narratives are divided into oral biographies, patient or client narratives (among which stories of divination stand out), and a smaller corpus, which contains the occurrences of the narrativisation of a person. The witch of Äksi was a city-born urbanite, who adapted to country life and unfamiliar socio-political circumstances. The narratives reflect the traditional duties of a witch/clairvoyant: looking for missing family members; searching for criminals or missing people in co-operation with the authorities; looking for stolen goods and animals; helping with matters of love and family relations; predicting one’s future and fate; healing, and single political prophesies

Loitsud ja rahvaarstid Virumaal

On the basis of Virumaa material, the article discusses healing words as well as charms that were used to regulate communication between human beings and the world of spirits. Healing words richly varied in form made use of fragments of prayers, Bible texts, and hymnals, and were based on legend material, allusions, and mythic worldview. The article gives an overview of a) the relationship between oral and written lore in charm tradition, connections with fictional and real books of wisdom; b) exchange of language codes; c) regulations of word-magic behaviour; d) healing charms and charms regulating social relations, housekeeping, and humans’ relationship with nature. The second half of the article discusses changes in healers’ healing tradition. During the past century, folk medicine integrated knowledge from different schools, and the importance of alternative and complementary medicine, such as yoga, Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and music therapy (most of these cosmopolitan), increased. So we can conclude that cosmopolitan folk medicine exists side by side with official medicine. Another significant trend rising to the fore highlights the importance of local folk medicine, which emphasises traditional values and creates novel cultural interpretations. To characterise the changes, the article introduces four healers, ranging from a half-mythic witch-herder to the healers-innovators of medical methods and local culture

Autismispektri häire nüüdisaegne käsitlus

Psühhiaatriline nosoloogia ei ole viimase sajandi jooksul sugugi olnud kivisse raiutud, vaid arenev, normaalsuse ja häire piire kompiv ning ühiskondlikest muutustest mõjutatud valdkond. Artikli eesmärk on anda lühiülevaade autismispektri häire mõiste kujunemisest, diagnoosi levimuse muutustest ning võimalikest põhjustest praeguste teadmiste ja arusaamade piires. Olgu siinkohal kohe öeldud, et autismispektri häired on väga heterogeenne grupp ning piir kergema autismispektri häire ja nn normaalsuse vahel ei ole alati nii selge. Sellest tulenevalt võib olla autismispektri häirega inimeste iseseisev toimetulek ja kõrvalabi vajadus väga erinev. Eesti Arst 2018; 97(6):312–318 &nbsp