VIBRATIONAL ANALYSIS OF TENNIS RACQUET COMPOSITE GRIPS WITH RATIOS OF CARBON AND GLASS FIBRES

The purpose of this study was to analyze the vibrations from different tennis racquet grip materials. For this study, five different kinds of tennis racquet grips were used. The materials in the actual grip were composed of a mixture of carbon fibre and glass fibre in the ratio of 10 to 0, 7 to 3, 5 to 5, 3 to 7, and 0 to 10. Two accelerometers and BioPAC system were used to acquire the vibrational signals. The results of this study indicated that the tennis racquet made of pure carbon fibre, had a higher damping ratio on the center and off-center impact. The damping ratio was significantly decreased as the content of glass fibre in the racquet was increased (p.05). However, the value of the integral power spectrum was significantly increased (p). Therefore, based on the vibrational analysis among the difference in material composition of tennis racquets, it concluded that increasing the content of glass fibre in the racquet would increase the load carried by the tennis player’s arm

Measuring center of pressure signals to quantify human balance using multivariate multiscale entropy by designing a force platform

Copyright @ 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).To assess the improvement of human body balance, a low cost and portable measuring device of center of pressure (COP), known as center of pressure and complexity monitoring system (CPCMS), has been developed for data logging and analysis. In order to prove that the system can estimate the different magnitude of different sways in comparison with the commercial Advanced Mechanical Technology Incorporation (AMTI) system, four sway tests have been developed (i.e., eyes open, eyes closed, eyes open with water pad, and eyes closed with water pad) to produce different sway displacements. Firstly, static and dynamic tests were conducted to investigate the feasibility of the system. Then, correlation tests of the CPCMS and AMTI systems have been compared with four sway tests. The results are within the acceptable range. Furthermore, multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) and enhanced multivariate multiscale entropy (MMSE) analysis methods have been used to analyze COP data reported by the CPCMS and compare it with the AMTI system. The improvements of the CPCMS are 35% to 70% (open eyes test) and 60% to 70% (eyes closed test) with and without water pad. The AMTI system has shown an improvement of 40% to 80% (open eyes test) and 65% to 75% (closed eyes test). The results indicate that the CPCMS system can achieve similar results to the commercial product so it can determine the balance.National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan and the Center for Dynamical Biomarkers and Translational Medicine, National Central University, Taiwan (which is sponsored by the NSC)

An Automatic Indirect Immunofluorescence Cell Segmentation System

Indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) with HEp-2 cells has been used for the detection of antinuclear autoantibodies (ANA) in systemic autoimmune diseases. The ANA testing allows us to scan a broad range of autoantibody entities and to describe them by distinct fluorescence patterns. Automatic inspection for fluorescence patterns in an IIF image can assist physicians, without relevant experience, in making correct diagnosis. How to segment the cells from an IIF image is essential in developing an automatic inspection system for ANA testing. This paper focuses on the cell detection and segmentation; an efficient method is proposed for automatically detecting the cells with fluorescence pattern in an IIF image. Cell culture is a process in which cells grow under control. Cell counting technology plays an important role in measuring the cell density in a culture tank. Moreover, assessing medium suitability, determining population doubling times, and monitoring cell growth in cultures all require a means of quantifying cell population. The proposed method also can be used to count the cells from an image taken under a fluorescence microscope

The Impact of Timing and Dose of Rehabilitation Delivery on Functional Recovery of Stroke Patients

BackgroundTo investigate the impact of both timing and dose of rehabilitation delivery on the functional recovery of stroke patients.MethodsFrom chart review, we included 76 patients who were admitted to a regional hospital for first-ever stroke, and who had received multidisciplinary rehabilitation programs including physical therapy (PT) and occupational therapy (OT) at the inpatient department, and continuous rehabilitation therapy at the outpatient department for at least 3 months. The collected data included age, sex, type of stroke (hemorrhage/infarction), onset of stroke, initial motor status by Brunnstrom's motor recovery stages, time to rehabilitation intervention (from onset of stroke), length of stay, existence of aphasia, craniotomy (yes/no), and total units of rehabilitation. Main outcome measures were serial Barthel Index (BI) at initial assessment, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year post-stroke.ResultsAge was inversely correlated with BI and BI improvement at 3 months and 6 months post-stroke. Rehabilitation intervention time from onset was negatively correlated with BI improvement at 1 month and 1 year, and with BI at 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year post-stroke. The total units of inpatient PT and/or OT were positively correlated with BI improvement at 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months post-stroke. The total units of PT and/or OT were positively correlated with BI improvement at 3 months and 6 months post-stroke. And the initial BI was positively correlated with BI at 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months post-stroke. The total units of OT can significantly predict BI improvement at 3 months and 6 months post-stroke, while the initial BI capacity can significantly predict BI status at 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months post-stroke.ConclusionThere is a dose-dependent effect of rehabilitation on functional improvement of stroke patients for the first 6 months post-stroke, and earlier delivery of rehabilitation has lasting effects on the functional recovery of stroke patients up to 1 year

Oriented Three-Dimensional Magnetic Biskyrmion in MnNiGa Bulk Crystals

A biskyrmion consists of two bound, topologically stable skyrmion spin textures. These coffee-bean-shaped objects have been observed in real-space in thin plates using Lorentz transmission electron microscopy (LTEM). From LTEM imaging alone, it is not clear whether biskyrmions are surface-confined objects, or, analogously to skyrmions in non-centrosymmetric helimagnets, three-dimensional tube-like structures in bulk sample. Here, we investigate the biskyrmion form factor in single- and polycrystalline MnNiGa samples using small angle neutron scattering (SANS). We find that biskyrmions are not long-range ordered, not even in single-crystals. Surprisingly all of the disordered biskyrmions have their in-plane symmetry axis aligned along certain directions, governed by the magnetocrystalline anisotropy. This anisotropic nature of biskyrmions may be further exploited to encode information

Exact Speedup Factors for Linear-Time Schedulability Tests for Fixed-Priority Preemptive and Non-preemptive Scheduling

In this paper, we investigate the quality of several linear-time schedulability tests for preemptive and non-preemptive fixed-priority scheduling of uniprocessor systems. The metric used to assess the quality of these tests is the resource augmentation bound commonly known as the processor speedup factor. The speedup factor of a schedulability test corresponds to the smallest factor by which the processing speed of a uniprocessor needs to be increased such that any task set that is feasible under an optimal preemptive (non-preemptive) work-conserving scheduling algorithm is guaranteed to be schedulable with preemptive (non-preemptive) fixed priority scheduling if this scheduling test is used, assuming an appropriate priority assignment. We show the surprising result that the exact speedup factors for Deadline Monotonic (DM) priority assignment combined with sufficient linear-time schedulability tests for implicit-, constrained-, and arbitrary-deadline task sets are the same as those obtained for optimal priority assignment policies combined with exact schedulability tests. Thus in terms of the speedup-factors required, there is no penalty in using DM priority assignment and simple linear schedulability tests