IS GAIT ANALYSIS USEFUL IN REHABILITATION ?

INTRODUCTION: In current clinical practice, physical examination, X-rays and subjective impressions are the most frequent methods for evaluation of an individual’s orthopaedic condition. These familiar methods cannot predict the biomechanical function (i.e. forces, structural integrity) of joints, of a complete leg or of the locomotor apparatus. In addition to clinical evaluation more specific functional measurements of the movement apparatus, particularly during gait, seem to be desirable. This presentation illustrates our experiences with instrumented gait analysis and its efficiency as a scientific and clinical tool. The main problem is to look for sensitive parameters (indicators), which characterize the functional state of patient’s locomotor apparatus. METHODS: Our gait analysis is based on measurement of kinematic and kinetic data during level walking on a 12 m walkway, and sometimes EMG data for special cases. Measurement systems are one optoelectronical device (PRIMAS, Delft, NL) and two force plates (KISTLER, Winterthur, CH). Since 1992, 600 individuals (including amputees, orthopaedic patients and normal subjects) were measured in our gait lab. Selected systematic tests were performed with amputees, whereby different prosthetic components and prosthetic alignments were used. Also, single cases without positive clinical or X-ray findings, who complained of functional pain, received gait analysis. RESULTS: Joint moments are the single best indicators of the manner in which amputees adapt their motor activity to changes in the prosthesis. Patients complaining of pain despite negative clinical findings walk with asymmetrical muscle joint moments. Such joint moments often objectively document the patient’s rehabilitation state and his or her progress. CONCLUSIONS: The human gait cycle is a consistant and precise repeatable complex of movements performed one million times annually. Therefore, gait analysis can only be clinically useful if measurement systems can very sensitively and fastly determine external joint moments. For orthopaedic and prosthetic tasks, such measurement equipment is now available. In addition to instrumented gait analysis biomechanical knowledge is absolutly necessary so that orthopaedic patients can benefit from the valuable data of gait and motion analysis

Warum Unternehmen ältere Arbeitnehmer brauchen

Die Anforderungen an Arbeitnehmer verändern sich immer schneller. Bisher wurden die passenden Menschen ausgewählt, weil das Angebot groß genug war. Aber diese Strategie geht kaum noch auf. Deshalb beginnt ein Umdenken, hin zu einer gezielten Integrationsleistung in der Personalentwicklung

Social norms and webcam use in online meetings

Face-to-face meetings are often preferred over other forms of communication because meeting in person provides the “richest” way to communicate. Face-to-face meetings are so rich because many ways of communicating (spoken language and nonverbal cues) are available to support mutual understanding. With the progress of digitization and driven by the need to reduce personal contact during the global pandemic, many face-to-face work meetings have been shifted to videoconferences. With webcams turned on, video calls come closest to the richness of face-to-face meetings. However, webcam use often remains voluntary, and some participants choose not to turn their cameras on. In order to find ways to support webcam use—when desired—we analyzed how social norms in groups affect the decision to activate a webcam in a specific meeting. Based on an online survey with N = 333 participants, we found that social norms are related to an individual’s decision to turn on the webcam, even when controlling for group size. If the number of participants with activated webcams in a university meeting increased by 25%, it was 5.92 times more likely that an individual decided to turn their webcam on, too. Furthermore, 81.84% of respondents indicated they would turn on their webcam if participants in a meeting were explicitly asked to do so. The results demonstrate a strong relation between social norms and the decision to activate a webcam in online meetings. They build a basis for enhancing webcam use and enable a greater richness of communication in online meetings

The joy of gratifications: Promotion as a short-term boost or long-term success – The same for women and men?

Job satisfaction helps create a committed workforce with many positive effects, such as increased organisational citizenship behaviour and reduced absenteeism. In turn, job satisfaction can be increased through gratifications, such as wage increases and promotions. But human satisfaction is prone to being governed by the homeostatic principle and will eventually return to the individual's base level. Thus, we longitudinally examined the effects of promotions to managerial positions and pay raises on job satisfaction across a period of 27 years. Our analyses were based on a large-scale representative German panel (N = 5978 observations) that allowed us to separate the effect of a promotion from the effect of the corresponding wage increase. We found that promotions positively affected job satisfaction in the short term but diminished after 1 year. Furthermore, the influence of a promotion on job satisfaction was more pronounced for men than for women

Evaluation des Utopia City-Guides

Der Utopia City-Guide ist ein internetbasiertes bundesweites Branchenbuch für nachhaltige Produkte und Dienstleistungen. Welche Chancen und Risiken sind mit der Einführung des Branchenbuches verbunden

On the relation between social dominance orientation and environmentalism: A 25-nation study

International audienc

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

What means sustainability and sustainable development?

What is the meaning of the terms sustainable development and sustainability? Although both terms have general positive connotation, thereremains a difference between the connotation of sustainable development and sustainability. These differences are particularly true for people that do not know the terms

Naturbewusstsein psychologisch: Was ist Naturbewusstsein, wie misst man es und wie wirkt es auf Umweltschutzverhalten?

In der Naturbewusstseinsstudie 2011 „werden unter Naturbewusstsein subjektive Auffassungen von Natur und Einstellungen zur Natur gefasst“ (Kleinhückelkotten/Neitzke 2012: 6). Diese von der Person ausgehende individuelle Perspektive entspricht dem Einstellungskonzept der Psychologie. Doch was sind Einstellungen genau? Wie kann man sie messen? Und warum sind sie interessant für den Natur- und Umweltschutz?1 Genau diese Fragen werden wir in diesem Kapitel aus psychologischer Perspektive beantworten. Ausgehend von einer Darstellung des allgemeinen Einstellungskonzepts der Psychologie, stellen wir Erkenntnisse speziell zur Natureinstellung zusammen. Im darauf folgenden und zentralen Teil unseres Beitrags konzentrieren wir uns auf die Messung der Natureinstellung. Schließlich belegen wir anhand empirischer Befunde, welchen Nutzen die Förderung von Natureinstellung für den Umweltschutz haben kann. Zu Beginn möchten wir Sie aber gerne im folgenden Exkurs bei der weitverbreiteten klassischen Einstellungsmessung, die auf verbalen Meinungsäußerungen beruht und mit der die meisten Praktiker gut vertraut sind, abholen