Toe clearance and velocity profiles of young and elderly during walking on sloped surfaces

Background Most falls in older adults are reported during locomotion and tripping has been identified as a major cause of falls. Challenging environments (e.g., walking on slopes) are potential interventions for maintaining balance and gait skills. The aims of this study were: 1) to investigate whether or not distributions of two important gait variables [minimum toe clearance (MTC) and foot velocity at MTC (VelMTC)] and locomotor control strategies are altered during walking on sloped surfaces, and 2) if altered, are they maintained at two groups (young and elderly female groups). Methods MTC and VelMTC data during walking on a treadmill at sloped surfaces (+3°, 0° and -3°) were analysed for 9 young (Y) and 8 elderly (E) female subjects. Results MTC distributions were found to be positively skewed whereas VelMTC distributions were negatively skewed for both groups on all slopes. Median MTC values increased (Y = 33%, E = 7%) at negative slope but decreased (Y = 25%, E = 15%) while walking on the positive slope surface compared to their MTC values at the flat surface (0°). Analysis of VelMTC distributions also indicated significantly (p < 0.05) lower minimum and 25th percentile (Q1) values in the elderly at all slopes. Conclusion The young displayed a strong positive correlation between MTC median changes and IQR (interquartile range) changes due to walking on both slopes; however, such correlation was weak in the older adults suggesting differences in control strategies being employed to minimize the risk of tripping

Online Drift Correction in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Spatio-Temporal Modeling

Wireless sensor networks are deployed for the purpose of sensing and monitoring an area of interest. Sensors in the sensor network can suffer from both random and systematic bias problems. Even when the sensors are properly calibrated at the time of their deployment, they develop drift in their readings leading to erroneous inferences being made by the network. The drift in this context is defined as a slow, unidirectional, long-term change in the sensor measurements. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for detecting and correcting sensors drifts by utilising the spatio-temporal correlation between neigbouring sensors. Based on the assumption that neighbouring sensors have correlated measurements and that the instantiation of drift in a sensor is uncorrelated with other sensors, each sensor runs a support vector regression algorithm on its neigbourspsila corrected readings to obtain a predicted value for its measurements. It then uses this predicted data to self-assess its measurement and detect and correct its drift using a Kalman filter. The algorithm is run recursively and is totally decentralized. We demonstrate using real data obtained from the Intel Berkeley Laboratory that our algorithm successfully suppresses drifts developed in sensors and thereby prolongs the effective lifetime of the network

Spatial Indexing for Data Searching in Mobile Sensing Environments

Data searching and retrieval is one of the fundamental functionalities in many Web of Things applications, which need to collect, process and analyze huge amounts of sensor stream data. The problem in fact has been well studied for data generated by sensors that are installed at fixed locations; however, challenges emerge along with the popularity of opportunistic sensing applications in which mobile sensors keep reporting observation and measurement data at variable intervals and changing geographical locations. To address these challenges, we develop the Geohash-Grid Tree, a spatial indexing technique specially designed for searching data integrated from heterogeneous sources in a mobile sensing environment. Results of the experiments on a real-world dataset collected from the SmartSantander smart city testbed show that the index structure allows efficient search based on spatial distance, range and time windows in a large time series database

Spatio-temporal Modelling-based Drift-aware Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are deployed for the purpose of monitoring an area of interest. Even when the sensors are properly calibrated at the time of deployment, they develop drift in their readings leading to erroneous network inferences. Based on the

Molecular epidemiology of peste des petits ruminants viruses from southern India

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