Assessment of psychomotor skills using finger pulse guided biofeedback tool in young medical students: Psychomotor skills using heart rate as biofeedback tool

Psychomotor skills are the organized patterns of muscular activities guided by signals from the environment. These skills can be influenced by factors like age, gender, built of an individual and handedness. It’s a known fact that the dominant hand has more dexterity; nevertheless, proficiency of the non-dominant hand can be improved with repetition of tasks and procedures. The aim of the present study was to examine the influence of biofeedback mechanism on psychomotor skills performance and gender variation in their activity. Eighty participants aged between 20-30 years were recruited after taking the informed consent. All the subjects performed number countdown test and 100 pin dexterity test. Tests were done by fixing the subject’s heart beats instead of stipulated time which was picked up by finger Pulse plethysmography using optocoupler principle. The results were compared between the males and age-matched female participants. The pin dexterity scores with a right and left hands in males (57.2±8.1, 42.16±7.3) were significantly higher than females (48.41±8.4, 37.58±6.8) (p = 0.001 and p = 0.01). There was no significant difference in number countdown test scores. The results suggest that males handle a skilled performance better than females. This is perhaps males were less anxious as the task was designed in such way that it has to be completed by counting down the heart beats. In that way, the males got more time duration as the heart rate did not shoot up when the task was assigned

Effect of series resistance and interface state density on electrical characteristics of Au/SiO2/n-GaN Schottky diodes

metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) Schottky diodes and compared with (Au/n-GaN)metal-semiconductor (MS) Schottky diode. The effect of SiO2 on the surface preparation of n-GaN (MIS) Schottky diode is analyzed. The extracted Schottky barrier height and ideality factor of the MS Schottky diode is found to be 0.79 eV and 1.45 respectively. It is observed that the Schottky barrier height increases to 0.86 eV and ideality factor decreases to 1.3 for MIS diode. The interface state density as determined by Terman’s method is found to be 3.79 × 1012 and 3.41 × 1010 cm - 2 eV - 1 for the MS and MIS Schottky diodes, respectively. In addition, the values of series resistance (Rs) are determined using Cheung’s method. The I - V characteristics confirmed that the distribution of Nss, Rs and interfacial layer are important parameters that influence the electrical characteristics of MIS Schottky diodes. When you are citing the document, use the following link http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/2222

Investigation of the effect of Au2O3 dopant on elastic properties of PbO-B2O3-SeO2: Er2O3 glass ceramics by ultrasonic techniques

Various elastic coefficients of Au2O3 doped PbO-B2O3-SeO2:Er2O3 (PBSE) glass ceramics were evaluated as functions of Au2O3 content using ultrasonic velocity measurements. The elastic coefficients and micro-hardness showed a decreasing tendency with the concentration of Au2O3. Such decrease is attributed to the increasing concentration of gold metallic particles and [SeO3]2- groups that acted as modifiers and induced imperfections in these samples. Obtained results were observed to be consistent with the conclusions drawn from spectroscopic studies that include X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), infrared (IR), photoluminescence (PL) and positron annihilation (PAL) spectroscopy studies. Overall, these studies have revealed that even though, the presence of gold metallic particles is preferable for achieving superior luminescence and electrical properties, presence of such particles caused to decrease the elastic coefficients and micro-hardness of these glass ceramics. However, when the concentration of Au2O3 is increased beyond 0.075 mol%, we have observed a slight increase of elastic coefficients and micro-hardness.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure

Multi-objective optimization for optimum tolerance synthesis with process and machine selection using a genetic algorithm

This paper presents a new approach to the tolerance synthesis of the component parts of assemblies by simultaneously optimizing three manufacturing parameters: manufacturing cost, including tolerance cost and quality loss cost; machining time; and machine overhead/idle time cost. A methodology has been developed using the Genetic Algorithm (GA) technique to solve this multi-objective optimization problem. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology has been demonstrated by solving a wheel mounting assembly problem consisting of five components, two subassemblies, two critical dimensions, two functional tolerances, and eight operations. Significant cost saving can be achieved by employing this methodology

The International Natural Product Sciences Taskforce (INPST) and the power of Twitter networking exemplified through #INPST hashtag analysis

Background: The development of digital technologies and the evolution of open innovation approaches have enabled the creation of diverse virtual organizations and enterprises coordinating their activities primarily online. The open innovation platform titled "International Natural Product Sciences Taskforce" (INPST) was established in 2018, to bring together in collaborative environment individuals and organizations interested in natural product scientific research, and to empower their interactions by using digital communication tools. Methods: In this work, we present a general overview of INPST activities and showcase the specific use of Twitter as a powerful networking tool that was used to host a one-week "2021 INPST Twitter Networking Event" (spanning from 31st May 2021 to 6th June 2021) based on the application of the Twitter hashtag #INPST. Results and Conclusion: The use of this hashtag during the networking event period was analyzed with Symplur Signals (https://www.symplur.com/), revealing a total of 6,036 tweets, shared by 686 users, which generated a total of 65,004,773 impressions (views of the respective tweets). This networking event's achieved high visibility and participation rate showcases a convincing example of how this social media platform can be used as a highly effective tool to host virtual Twitter-based international biomedical research events

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio