scholarly journals A customizable tablet app for hand movement research outside the lab

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Matic ◽  
Alex Gomez-Marin

ABSTRACTBackgroundPrecise behavioral measurements allow the discovery of movement constraints that provide insights into sensory-motor processes and their underlying neural mechanisms. For instance, when humans draw an ellipse on a piece of paper, the instantaneous speed of the pen co-varies tightly with the local curvature of the path. Known as the speed-curvature power law, this phenomenon relates to fundamental questions of motor control.New MethodWe have developed a software app for displaying static curves or dynamic targets while recording finger or stylus movements on Android touch-screen tablets. Designed for human hand movement research, the app is free, ready-to-use, open-source and customizable.ResultsWe provide a template experimental protocol, and detailed explanations to use it and flexibly modify the code for different kinds of tasks. Our validation of the app demonstrates laboratory-quality results outside the laboratory. We also provide raw data and analysis scripts.Comparison with Existing MethodsCommonly used laboratory devices for recording hand movement trajectories are large, heavy and expensive. In turn, software apps are often not published, nor customizable. Our app running on tablets becomes an affordable, flexible, and portable tool suited for quantitative and robust behavioral studies with large number of participants and outside the laboratory (e.g. in a classroom, a hospital, or at home).ConclusionsThe affordability, flexibility, and resolution of our tablet app provide an effective tool to study behavior quantitatively in the real world.HighlightsA free, ready-to-use, open source, and customizable app for Android tablets.High-resolution measuring of finger movement during tracing, tracking & scribbling.Fast and easy data collection and experimental design with affordable hardware.Allowing for high-throughput experiments outside the lab (classroom, hospital, home).Validated for state-of-the-art research (speed-curvature power law, drawing accuracy).

2009 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 1002-1015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uri Maoz ◽  
Alain Berthoz ◽  
Tamar Flash

One long-established simplifying principle behind the large repertoire and high versatility of human hand movements is the two-thirds power law—an empirical law stating a relationship between local geometry and kinematics of human hand trajectories during planar curved movements. It was further generalized not only to various types of human movements, but also to motion perception and prediction, although it was unsuccessful in explaining unconstrained three-dimensional (3D) movements. Recently, movement obeying the power law was proved to be equivalent to moving with constant planar equi-affine speed. Generalizing such motion to 3D space—i.e., to movement at constant spatial equi-affine speed—predicts the emergence of a new power law, whose utility for describing spatial scribbling movements we have previously demonstrated. In this empirical investigation of the new power law, subjects repetitively traced six different 3D geometrical shapes with their hand. We show that the 3D power law explains the data consistently better than both the two-thirds power law and an additional power law that was previously suggested for spatial hand movements. We also found small yet systematic modifications of the power-law's exponents across the various shapes, which further scrutiny suggested to be correlated with global geometric factors of the traced shape. Nevertheless, averaging over all subjects and shapes, the power-law exponents are generally in accordance with constant spatial equi-affine speed. Taken together, our findings provide evidence for the potential role of non-Euclidean geometry in motion planning and control. Moreover, these results seem to imply a relationship between geometry and kinematics that is more complex than the simple local one stipulated by the two-thirds power law and similar models.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Saygin Siddiq Ahmed ◽  
Ahmed R. J. Almusawi ◽  
Bülent Yilmaz ◽  
Nuran Dogru

Abstract. This study introduces a new control method for electromyography (EMG) in a prosthetic hand application with a practical design of the whole system. The hand is controlled by a motor (which regulates a significant part of the hand movement) and a microcontroller board, which is responsible for receiving and analyzing signals acquired by a Myoware muscle device. The Myoware device accepts muscle signals and sends them to the controller. The controller interprets the received signals based on the designed artificial neural network. In this design, the muscle signals are read and saved in a MATLAB system file. After neural network program processing by MATLAB, they are then applied online to the prosthetic hand. The obtained signal, i.e., electromyogram, is programmed to control the motion of the prosthetic hand with similar behavior to a real human hand. The designed system is tested on seven individuals at Gaziantep University. Due to the sufficient signal of the Mayo armband compared to Myoware sensors, Mayo armband muscle is applied in the proposed system. The discussed results have been shown to be satisfactory in the final proposed system. This system was a feasible, useful, and cost-effective solution for the handless or amputated individuals. They have used the system in their day-to-day activities that allowed them to move freely, easily, and comfortably.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mickael Silva ◽  
Miguel Machado ◽  
Diogo N. Silva ◽  
Mirko Rossi ◽  
Jacob Moran-Gilad ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTGene-by-gene approaches are becoming increasingly popular in bacterial genomic epidemiology and outbreak detection. However, there is a lack of open-source scalable software for schema definition and allele calling for these methodologies. The chewBBACA suite was designed to assist users in the creation and evaluation of novel whole-genome or core-genome gene-by-gene typing schemas and subsequent allele calling in bacterial strains of interest. The software can run in a laptop or in high performance clusters making it useful for both small laboratories and large reference centers. ChewBBACA is available athttps://github.com/B-UMMI/chewBBACAor as a docker image athttps://hub.docker.com/r/ummidock/chewbbaca/.DATA SUMMARYAssembled genomes used for the tutorial were downloaded from NCBI in August 2016 by selecting those submitted asStreptococcus agalactiaetaxon or sub-taxa. All the assemblies have been deposited as a zip file in FigShare (https://figshare.com/s/9cbe1d422805db54cd52), where a file with the original ftp link for each NCBI directory is also available.Code for the chewBBACA suite is available athttps://github.com/B-UMMI/chewBBACAwhile the tutorial example is found athttps://github.com/B-UMMI/chewBBACA_tutorial.I/We confirm all supporting data, code and protocols have been provided within the article or through supplementary data files. ⊠IMPACT STATEMENTThe chewBBACA software offers a computational solution for the creation, evaluation and use of whole genome (wg) and core genome (cg) multilocus sequence typing (MLST) schemas. It allows researchers to develop wg/cgMLST schemes for any bacterial species from a set of genomes of interest. The alleles identified by chewBBACA correspond to potential coding sequences, possibly offering insights into the correspondence between the genetic variability identified and phenotypic variability. The software performs allele calling in a matter of seconds to minutes per strain in a laptop but is easily scalable for the analysis of large datasets of hundreds of thousands of strains using multiprocessing options. The chewBBACA software thus provides an efficient and freely available open source solution for gene-by-gene methods. Moreover, the ability to perform these tasks locally is desirable when the submission of raw data to a central repository or web services is hindered by data protection policies or ethical or legal concerns.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-84
Author(s):  
Yanbo Huang ◽  
D. K. Fisher

HighlightsA web application for guiding data calculated from distributed weather data through open-source cloud service.A design scheme of portable weather stations built from inexpensive open-source electronics.Integration of open-source hardware and software for online guiding data to avoid drift caused by temperature inversion.Abstract. It is important for agricultural chemical applicators to follow proper spray procedures to prevent susceptible crops, animals, people, or other living organisms from being injured far downwind. Spraying during stable atmospheric conditions should be avoided to prevent surface-temperature inversion-induced off-target drift of crop protection materials. Previous statistical analysis determined times of high likelihood of stable atmospheric conditions, which are unfavorable for spraying, during the day under clear and cloudy conditions in hot summer months in the Mississippi Delta. Results validated the thresholds of temperature increase in the morning and temperature drop in the afternoon with wind speeds and the transition between stable and unstable atmospheric conditions. With this information, an algorithm was developed to calculate if atmospheric conditions were favorable for spraying based on field temperature and wind speed at any instant. With this algorithm, a web application was built to provide real-time determination of atmospheric stability and hourly online recommendation of whether aerial applications were appropriate for a location and time in the Mississippi Delta. This study further developed another web application specifically for Stoneville, Mississippi, with data measured from weather stations constructed from inexpensive open-source electronics, accessories, and software for more accurate online guidance for site-specific drift management. The web application is adapted for accessing on mobile terminals, such as smartphones and tablets, and provides timely guidance for aerial applicators and producers to avoid spray drift and air quality issues long distances downwind in the area. Keywords: Open-source hardware, Open-source software, Spray drift, Temperature inversion, Web application.


2015 ◽  
pp. 1722-1743
Author(s):  
Liguo Yu

Scheduling and staffing are important management activities in software projects. In closed-source software development, the relationships among development effort, time, and staffing have been well established and validated: the development effort determines the development time and the best number of developers that should be allocated to the project. However, there has been no similar research reported in open-source projects. In this chapter, the authors study the development effort, development time, and staffing in an open-source project, the Linux kernel project. Specifically, they investigate the power law relations among development effort, development time, and the number of active developers in the Linux kernel project. The authors find the power law relations differ from one branch to another branch in the Linux kernel project, which suggests different kinds of management and development styles might exist in different branches of the Linux kernel project. The empirical knowledge of software development effort obtained in this study could help project management and cost control in both open-source communities and closed-source industries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (22) ◽  
pp. 9778
Author(s):  
Wei Zhu ◽  
Ding Ma ◽  
Zhigang Zhao ◽  
Renzhong Guo

Location-based social media have facilitated us to bridge the gap between virtual and physical worlds through the exploration of human online dynamics from a geographic perspective. This study uses a large collection of geotagged photos from Flickr to investigate the complexity of spatial interactions at the country level. We adopted three levels of administrative divisions in mainland China—province, city, and county—as basic geographic units and established three types of topology—province–province network, city–city network, and county–county network—from the extracted user movement trajectories. We conducted the scaling analysis based on heavy-tailed distribution statistics including power law exponents, goodness of fit index, and ht-index, by which we characterized a great complexity of the trajectory lengths, spatial distribution of geotagged photos, and the related metrics of built networks. The great complexity indicates the highly imbalanced ratio of populated-to-unpopulated areas or large-to-small flows between areas. More interestingly, all power law exponents were around 2 for the networks at various spatial and temporal scales. Such a recurrence of scaling statistics at multiple resolutions can be regarded a statistical self-similarity and could thus help us to reveal the fractal nature of human mobility patterns.


2013 ◽  
Vol 284-287 ◽  
pp. 3126-3130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ching Yee Yong ◽  
Rubita Sudirman ◽  
Nasrul Humaimi Mahmood ◽  
Kim Mey Chew

This study investigates and acts as a trial clinical outcome for human motion and behavior analysis in order to investigate human arm movement during jogging and walking. It was developed to analyze and access the quality of human motion that can be used in hospitals, clinics and human motion researches. It aims to establish how widespread the movement and motion of arm will bring to effect of human in life. An experiment was set up in a laboratory environment with conjunction of analyzing human motion and its behavior. The instruments demonstrate adequate internal consistency of optimum scatter plot in gyroscope and accelerometer for pattern classification. PCA used in this study was successfully differentiate and classify


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