Attention as a precondition of rehabilitation

Introduction: Attention, as a function, is described as a significant predictor of recovery after brain injury. It is also a necessary precondition for the patient’s participation in the further course of rehabilitation. Attention is defined as the ability to direct and maintain psychic energy to a selected number of relevant stimuli. The main features of attention are tenacity and vigilance. Tenacity means the ability to retain psychic energy for as long as a certain situation requires. For example, solving a specific task or multiple tasks. Vigilance is a feature of attention that psychic energy is quickly transferred from one information or stimulus to another. Aim: The aim of this study was to examine the influence of an experimental factor on attention recovery in people with brain injuries. Method: Two groups of subjects were formed, experimental and control. The experimental group consisted of subjects with brain injuries and the control group included their healthy peers. The subjects in both groups were aged 15-20 years. Subjects of the experimental group were subjected to the experimental factor. Results: The results of the study tested with easy-R software system (EZR, version 1.41.64-bit) showed highly statistically significant differences (p<.01) between the experimental and control groups. Conclusion: The application of the experimental factor contributed to the recovery of attention functions in subjects with brain injuries

Attention as a precondition of rehabilitation

Introduction: Attention, as a function, is described as a significant predictor of recovery after brain injury. It is also a necessary precondition for the patient’s participation in the further course of rehabilitation. Attention is defined as the ability to direct and maintain psychic energy to a selected number of relevant stimuli. The main features of attention are tenacity and vigilance. Tenacity means the ability to retain psychic energy for as long as a certain situation requires. For example, solving a specific task or multiple tasks. Vigilance is a feature of attention that psychic energy is quickly transferred from one information or stimulus to another. Aim: The aim of this study was to examine the influence of an experimental factor on attention recovery in people with brain injuries. Method: Two groups of subjects were formed, experimental and control. The experimental group consisted of subjects with brain injuries and the control group included their healthy peers. The subjects in both groups were aged 15-20 years. Subjects of the experimental group were subjected to the experimental factor. Results: The results of the study tested with easy-R software system (EZR, version 1.41.64-bit) showed highly statistically significant differences (p<.01) between the experimental and control groups. Conclusion: The application of the experimental factor contributed to the recovery of attention functions in subjects with brain injuries

Political and Economic Aspects of Serbo-Russian Relations from the Perspective of Serbian Citizens

We are witnessing that with the appearance of new global players on the international scene a multipolar world is gradually emerging and a new balance of power is being formed. Given this circumstance, it is very important that all other states clearly define their position towards these emerging poles of power. As Russia appears as one of those poles, it is necessary to look at the position of Serbia concerning political and economic cooperation between the two countries. One of the ways to do that is to look at these issues from the perspective of Serbian citizens. Accordingly, this paper aims to present the basic findings concerning the assessment and opinion of the citizens of Serbia towards political, economic and military cooperation between the Republic of Serbia and the Russian Federation based on the analysis of surveys conducted by the Institute for Political Studies in 2015–2020 period. The authors will also present the basic economic, trade and financial indicators of cooperation between Russia and Serbia, mainly trade relations and foreign direct investment

The Optimal combination: Grammatical Swarm, Particle Swarm Optimization and Neural Networks.

Social behaviour is mainly based on swarm colonies, in which each individual shares its knowledge about the environment with other individuals to get optimal solutions. Such co-operative model differs from competitive models in the way that individuals die and are born by combining information of alive ones. This paper presents the particle swarm optimization with differential evolution algorithm in order to train a neural network instead the classic back propagation algorithm. The performance of a neural network for particular problems is critically dependant on the choice of the processing elements, the net architecture and the learning algorithm. This work is focused in the development of methods for the evolutionary design of artificial neural networks. This paper focuses in optimizing the topology and structure of connectivity for these networks

TRAPEZOIDAL RULE FOR NUMERICAL EVALUATION OF FRACTIONAL ORDER INTEGRALS WITH APPLICATIONS TO SIMULATION AND IDENTIFICATION OF FRACTIONAL ORDER SYSTEMS

This paper presents an extension of the well-known trapezoidal (bilinear) integration rule, that in the present work is applied to the numerical evaluation of fractional-order integrals. Particularly, this approximation is exploited to derive viable numerical algorithms addressing two distinct problems: i) simulation of Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) Commensurate Fractional Order Systems (CFOS); ii) non-recursive parameter estimation in LTI-CFOS. More precisely, the problem of non-recursive parameter estimation is addressed in two different scenarios. The first one is when the commensurate order of the CFOS is known in advance, while the second, more general, one is that in which the commensurate order is unknown and is to be estimated. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is illustrated by numerical examples

Second-order sliding modes and soft computing techniques for fault detection

This paper outlines some results concerning the combined application of secondorder sliding-mode and soft-computing techniques in the framework of fault-detection problems. A method for estimating the discrete state of an LTI affine switched system is developed to that end. Simple controller/observer tuning formulas are constructively developed along the paper by Lyapunov analysis. Simulation and experimental results confirm the expected performance

Sliding mode control approaches to the robust regulation of linear multivariable fractional-order dynamics

Sliding mode control approaches are developed to stabilize a class of linear uncertain fractional-order dynamics. After making a suitable transformation that simplifies the sliding manifold design, two sliding mode control schemes are presented. The first one is based on the conventional discontinuous first-order sliding mode control technique. The second scheme is based on the chattering-free second-order sliding mode approach that leads to the same robust performance but using a continuous control action. Simple controller tuning formulas are constructively developed along the paper by Lyapunov analysis. The simulation results confirm the expected performance