Development and Testing of A Wearable Vibrotactile Haptic Feedback System For Proprioceptive Rehabilitation

The human sense of touch is an integral part of daily life. For tasks involving grasping and manipulation of objects, force feedback is a key requirement. Most of the systems give contact point or complete grasping force feedback; for precision grasping and other physical interactions, finger awareness and force feedback from independent fingers is essential. In this study a novel, wearable proprioceptive rehabilitation system is designed which restores the ability of identifying and distinguishing between individual fingers of a prosthetic hand or an exoskeleton in a non-invasive manner. Moreover, it provides different levels of force feedback from every finger as well, which enables the user to distinguish and control force in precision grasping activities. For testing the system accuracy, classical psychophysical methods were used on a group of 14 voluntary disabled subjects. The tests were conducted in both, ideal and real-world conditions i.e. without and with distractions and accuracies were calculated accordingly. A p-test was also conducted to observe significance between the samples of with and without distraction datasets. The system performed with an overall accuracy of 82.04% which was well above the min. performance measure of 60%. Vi-HaB is standalone system and can be mounted on any upper limb rehabilitation (prosthesis, exoskeleton) system for finger awareness and force feedback

Association of bone mineral density and body mass index in a cohort of Pakistanis: Relation to gender, menopause and ethnicity

Aim of the work: To assess association of body mass index (BMI) with bone mineral density (BMD) in a sample of Pakistanis and explore their relation with age, gender, menopausal status and ethnicity. Patients and methods: A cross-sectional study at a tertiary care rehabilitation medicine center included apparently healthy individuals referred for an assessment of BMD through dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). Subjects with any associated disorder, history of malignancy, intake of steroids, or under osteoporosis treatment were excluded. Patients were sub-grouped according to the age (⩽50 and >50 years) and menopausal status. The ethnicity was based on the provinces the patients came from. Results: Out of 600 people, 253 (42.2%) were males with a mean age of 65 ± 10 years (range: 28–100 years) and 347 (57.8%) were females (56 ± 10 years; range: 18–92 years). The majority of males had normal BMI and osteopenia while majority of females were overweight and had osteopenia. Most individuals among sub-groups based on age and menopausal status had their BMI in the overweight range. The mainstream of the subjects ⩽50 years and premenopausal women had a normal BMD and those >50 years had osteopenia. The majority of postmenopausal women had osteoporosis. The ethnicity (based on provinces) did not affect BMI or BMD. In both genders, the underweight individuals were more likely to develop osteoporosis than individuals who were overweight or had normal BMI. Conclusions: Majority of Pakistani women were overweight while men had a normal BMI. Younger age and premenopausal status was directly associated with a normal BMD. Both genders were significantly prone to have a low BMD if they had a lower BMI

Quantile Regression Methods of Estimating Confidence Intervals

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