Human Observer and Automatic Assessment of Movement Related Self-Efficacy in Chronic Pain: from Exercise to Functional Activity

Clinicians tailor intervention in chronic pain rehabilitation to movement related self-efficacy (MRSE). This motivates us to investigate automatic MRSE estimation in this context towards the development of technology that is able to provide appropriate support in the absence of a clinician. We first explored clinical observer estimation, which showed that body movement behaviours, rather than facial expressions or engagement behaviours, were more pertinent to MRSE estimation during physical activity instances. Based on our findings, we built a system that estimates MRSE from bodily expressions and bodily muscle activity captured using wearable sensors. Our results (F1 scores of 0.95 and 0.78 in two physical exercise types) provide evidence of the feasibility of automatic MRSE estimation to support chronic pain physical rehabilitation. We further explored automatic estimation of MRSE with a reduced set of low-cost sensors to investigate the possibility of embedding such capabilities in ubiquitous wearable devices to support functional activity. Our evaluation for both exercise and functional activity resulted in F1 score of 0.79. This result suggests the possibility of (and calls for more studies on) MRSE estimation during everyday functioning in ubiquitous settings. We provide a discussion of the implication of our findings for relevant areas

Antimicrobial activity of extracts and a germacranolidetype sesquiterpene lactone from Tithonia diversifolia leaf extract

The in vitro antimicrobial activity of the hexane, ethyl acetate and methanol extracts of the leaf of Tithonia diversifolia, and one sesquiterpene lactone 1 isolated from the ethyl acetate extract wasstudied. Of the fourteen strains of bacteria used, the ethyl acetate extract was the most active, showing inhibitory activity against five Gram +ve and two Gram –ve organisms. This was followed by the hexane extract and then methanol. The ethyl acetate fractions (TDE 2 – TDE 5, TDE 7, TDE 8 and TDE 10) showed varying degrees of inhibitory activity. The sesquiterpene lactone 1 showed activity against all the tested microorganisms, except Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus cereus (MICs = 15.6 – 62.5mg/ml for most stains). All the extracts, fractions and compound 1 showed activity against the fungusCandida albicans. The results of the present study indicate that the non-polar leaf extract of T.diversifolia could be useful in the treatment of some disease conditions and the sesquiterpene lactone 1 could be a good candidate as a phytotherapeutic agent against some bacterial infection

Pain level recognition using kinematics and muscle activity for physical rehabilitation in chronic pain

People with chronic musculoskeletal pain would benefit from technology that provides run-time personalized feedback and help adjust their physical exercise plan. However, increased pain during physical exercise, or anxiety about anticipated pain increase, may lead to setback and intensified sensitivity to pain. Our study investigates the possibility of detecting pain levels from the quality of body movement during two functional physical exercises. By analyzing recordings of kinematics and muscle activity, our feature optimization algorithms and machine learning techniques can automatically discriminate between people with low level pain and high level pain and control participants while exercising. Best results were obtained from feature set optimization algorithms: 94% and 80% for the full trunk flexion and sit-to-stand movements respectively using Support Vector Machines. As depression can affect pain experience, we included participants' depression scores on a standard questionnaire and this improved discrimination between the control participants and the people with pain when Random Forests were used. / Note: As originally published there is an error in the document. The following information was omitted by the authors: "The project was funded by the EPSRC grant Emotion & Pain Project EP/H017178/1 and Olugbade was supported by the 2012 Nigerian PRESSID PhD funding." The article PDF remains unchanged

EMOPAIN Challenge 2020: Multimodal Pain Evaluation from Facial and Bodily Expressions.

The EmoPain 2020 Challenge is the first international competition aimed at creating a uniform platform for the comparison of machine learning and multimedia processing methods of automatic chronic pain assessment from human expressive behaviour, and also the identification of pain-related behaviours. The objective of the challenge is to promote research in the development of assistive technologies that help improve the quality of life for people with chronic pain via real-time monitoring and feedback to help manage their condition and remain physically active. The challenge also aims to encourage the use of the relatively underutilised, albeit vital bodily expression signals for automatic pain and pain-related emotion recognition. This paper presents a description of the challenge, competition guidelines, bench-marking dataset, and the baseline systems' architecture and performance on the three sub-tasks: pain estimation from facial expressions, pain recognition from multimodal movement, and protective movement behaviour detection.PSRC grant Emotion& Pain Project; NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centr

What Cognitive and Affective States Should Technology Monitor to Support Learning?

This paper discusses self-efficacy, curiosity, and reflectivity as cognitive and affective states that are critical to learning but are overlooked in the context of affect-aware technology for learning. This discussion sits within the opportunities offered by the weDRAW project aiming at an embodied approach to the design of technology to support exploration and learning of mathematical concepts. We first review existing literature to clarify how the three states facilitate learning and how, if not supported, they may instead hinder learning. We then review the literature to understand how bodily expressions communicate these states and how technology could be used to monitor them. We conclude by presenting initial movement cues currently explored in the context of weDRAW

The Potential Contribution of Pharmacognosy to National Development

No Abstrac

Protocatechuic acid and saponin mixture from Steganotaenia araliacea stem bark

Steganotaenia araliacea Hochst (Apiaceae / Umbelliferae) is used in East and West African ethnomedicine for treating gastro-intestinal disorders, peptic ulcer, rheumatism and various diseases of microbial origin. The plant was therefore investigated for its chemical constituents while testing for possible antimicrobial, antioxidant, spasmolytic and anti-inflammatory activities. Through bioactivity-driven fractionation, protocatechuic acid was isolated from the ethyl acetate fraction as the main antimicrobial (agar diffusion) and antioxidant (radical scavenging-DPPH) principle. The crude extract exhibited spasmolytic activity, which was found to reside exclusively in the aqueous fraction. Further fractionation of the aqueous fraction yielded a saponin mixture. The observed spasmolytic effect was found to be antihistaminic rather than anticholinergic. The saponin mixture also demonstrated significant anti-inflammatory activity. At a dose of 1 mg/kg i.p. it gave a 77.7% inhibition of carrageenan-induced rat-paw oedema. Key words: Steganotaenia araliacea; Saponins; Antimicrobial; Antioxidant; Spasmolytic; Antiinflammatory Nig. J. Pharm. Res. 3(1) 2004: 9-1

Antibacterial phenolics from boswellia dalzielii

No Abstract.Nigerian Journal of Natural Products and Medicine Vol. 10 () 2006: pp.108-11