ENTRAPMENT NEUROPATHIES OF THE UPPER EXTREMITIES AND NEW TRENDS IN PHYSIOTHERAPY

Purpose. The purpose of this work was to highlight the importance of targeted physiotherapy in the treatment of nerve entrapment syndrome in the upper limb using the latest physiotherapeutic techniques.Material and methods. In this work, 56 patients are presented as diagnosed with nerve entrapment syndrome in the upper limb. 45 of them are women and 21 are men, ranging in age from 26–72 years old with an average age of 49 years. We evaluated the pain condition, pain intensity, and also functional deficits before and after rehabilitation treatment over a duration of four weeks.Conclusion. As a result of targeted therapy towards nerve entrapment syndrome in the upper limb, the functional condition of the majority of our patients has improved and their pain was reduced.The expected mechanism of this kind of physiotherapy is to improve blood circulation in the affected area, adjust the biomechanical forces that affect joint structures, improve the functional condition, and prevent a relapse of the disease from occurring.Keywords. Entrapment neuropathies, upper extremities, pain, physiotherapy

Cloud-based robots and intelligent space teleoperation tools

Despite an idea of robotic system teleoperation is a relatively old concept, here we present its enhancements heading to an interconnection of teleoperation and collecting relevant information from the environment where robots act. This environment should be an intelligent space featured with various devices and sensors, which allows to obtain, preprocess and stores data in the cloud. Those data should provide relevant information for teleoperator or directly for robots, which act autonomously. For this purpose, we developed cloud-based tools, named Telescope v2. It is a platform-independent system for remote monitoring and controlling various systems. In this paper, we introduce this system, its abilities, and compare it with its network-based ancestor, Telescope v1. We analyze measurements of latency and response time when our new system is used for teleoperation in different places equipped with various Internet bandwidths

Land Cover and Land Use Change-Driven Dynamics of Soil Organic Carbon in North-East Slovakian Croplands and Grasslands Between 1970 and 2013

Soil organic carbon (SOC) in agricultural land forms part of the global terrestrial carbon cycle and it affects atmospheric carbon dioxide balance. SOC is sensitive to local agricultural management practices that sum up into regional SOC storage dynamics. Understanding regional carbon emission and sequestration trends is, therefore, important in formulating and implementing climate change adaptation and mitigation policies. In this study, the estimation of SOC stock and regional storage dynamics in the Ondavská Vrchovina region (North-Eastern Slovakia) cropland and grassland topsoil between 1970 and 2013 was performed with the RothC model and gridded spatial data on weather, initial SOC stock and historical land cover and land use changes. Initial SOC stock in the 0.3-m topsoil layer was estimated at 38.4 t ha−1 in 1970. The 2013 simulated value was 49.2 t ha−1, and the 1993–2013 simulated SOC stock values were within the measured data range. The total SOC storage in the study area, cropland and grassland areas, was 4.21 Mt in 1970 and 5.16 Mt in 2013, and this 0.95 Mt net SOC gain was attributed to interconversions of cropland and grassland areas between 1970 and 2013, which caused different organic carbon inputs to the soil during the simulation period with a strong effect on SOC stock temporal dynamics

Stability and convergence in discrete convex monotone dynamical systems

We study the stable behaviour of discrete dynamical systems where the map is convex and monotone with respect to the standard positive cone. The notion of tangential stability for fixed points and periodic points is introduced, which is weaker than Lyapunov stability. Among others we show that the set of tangentially stable fixed points is isomorphic to a convex inf-semilattice, and a criterion is given for the existence of a unique tangentially stable fixed point. We also show that periods of tangentially stable periodic points are orders of permutations on $n$ letters, where $n$ is the dimension of the underlying space, and a sufficient condition for global convergence to periodic orbits is presented.Comment: 36 pages, 1 fugur

Effect of saliva from horse fly Hybomitra bimaculata on kinetic properties of Na,K-ATPase: possible role in regulation of relaxation

The possible involvement of salivary gland extract (SGE) from horse flies in modifying hyperpolarization and relaxation via alterations in functional properties of sarcolemmal Na,K-ATPase in the host tissue was tested in vitro by application of various amounts of SGE from Hybomitra bimaculata