scholarly journals Design of an assistive device to detect freezing episodes and provide audio/vibratory cues to avoid falls

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2.31) ◽  
pp. 114
Author(s):  
Vivek Chowdhury ◽  
Arka Goswami ◽  
Rakshit Nigam ◽  
P A Sridhar

This paper primarily discusses the Freezing of Gait which is a type of gait abnormality and generally occurs in Parkinson Disease patients which cause an interruption to their life. During a FOG episode, the subject is rendered unable to continue moving or even manoeuver. These episodes give rise to the danger of the patient landing on the ground and often renders a person immobile. The aim of this device is to develop a technique to identify the effect of ‘Freezing of Gait’ in people suffering from Parkinsons Disease and to provide feedback on detection and improving self-efficiency in about their daily life.

Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.


Neurology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. e280-e290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seok Jong Chung ◽  
Hye Sun Lee ◽  
Han Soo Yoo ◽  
Yang Hyun Lee ◽  
Phil Hyu Lee ◽  
...  

ObjectiveTo investigate whether the patterns of striatal dopamine depletion on dopamine transporter (DAT) scans could provide information on the long-term prognosis in Parkinson disease (PD).MethodsWe enrolled 205 drug-naive patients with early-stage PD, who underwent 18F-FP-CIT PET scans at initial assessment and received PD medications for 3 or more years. After quantifying the DAT availability in each striatal subregion, factor analysis was conducted to simplify the identification of striatal dopamine depletion patterns and to yield 4 striatal subregion factors. We assessed the effect of these factors on the development of levodopa-induced dyskinesia (LID), wearing-off, freezing of gait (FOG), and dementia during the follow-up period (6.84 ± 1.80 years).ResultsThe 4 factors indicated which striatal subregions were relatively preserved: factor 1 (caudate), factor 2 (more-affected sensorimotor striatum), factor 3 (less-affected sensorimotor striatum), and factor 4 (anterior putamen). Cox regression analyses using the composite scores of these striatal subregion factors as covariates demonstrated that selective dopamine depletion in the sensorimotor striatum was associated with a higher risk for developing LID. Selective dopamine loss in the putamen, particularly in the anterior putamen, was associated with early development of wearing-off. Selective involvement of the anterior putamen was associated with a higher risk for dementia conversion. However, the patterns of striatal dopamine depletion did not affect the risk of FOG.ConclusionsThese findings suggested that the patterns of striatal dopaminergic denervation, which were estimated by the equation derived from the factor analysis, have a prognostic implication in patients with early-stage PD.


Neurology ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 72 (8) ◽  
pp. 770-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Brozova ◽  
I. Barnaure ◽  
R. L. Alterman ◽  
M. Tagliati ◽  
C. Moreau ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 175-179
Author(s):  
Liana Cusmano

Liana Cusmano’s interview with poet George Amabile focuses on his prize-winning 2018 collection Martial Music and the art of writing in general. He offers insights on the poetic process, how to research and produce a collection of poems. Amabile’s poetry is inspired by what he has experienced or witnessed. He talks about dealing with war and trauma. He shares his frustration with daily life getting in the way of the creative process. “Life is the subject and the inspirational/ motivational source of our work, but it also sucks up our time and frustrates our ability to give our unstinted attention to our creative efforts,” says George Amabile.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 191-211
Author(s):  
Pamila Gupta

Stone Town’s busy streets in the 1950s became a set for photographer Ranchhod Oza, proprietor of Capital Art Studio (1930–83). I was aesthetically drawn to the numerous bicycles portrayed in these Zanzibari images, just as Oza had been at an earlier time and place. I am less interested in reading the subject of bicycles as simply a sign of Zanzibari modernity, an accoutrement that projects a fantasy of advancement via technological things. Instead, I focus on their ability to reflect various material aspects of daily life in Stone Town. Some bicycles carry people, others transport things, while still others appear as stage props, leaning up against walls while waiting (im)patiently for their owners to return. Yet in all these Oza images, they are moving still, ready to reach another chosen destination. What does the content of bicycles say about Oza’s photographic style? Can these bicycles potentially speak to Zanzibar’s placeness as a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean port city?


Author(s):  
Natasa K. Orphanidou ◽  
Abir Hussain ◽  
Robert Keight ◽  
Paulo Lishoa ◽  
Jade Hind ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Md Rejwanul Haque ◽  
Hao Zheng ◽  
Saroj Thapa ◽  
Geza Kogler ◽  
Xiangrong Shen

The ankle plays an important role in human movement as it supplies the majority of energy to support an individual’s walking. In this paper, the authors present a robotic ankle-foot orthosis (RAFO), which is essentially a wearable robot that acts in parallel to the user’s biological ankle for motion assistance. Unlike most of the existing robotic ankle-foot ortheses, the RAFO in this paper is a compact and portable assistive device with full energy autonomy, which enables its use in a user’s daily life without the typical limitation associated with tethered operation. The primary performance goal in the design of the RAFO is to provide a torque capacity equivalent to 35% of a 75 kg healthy person’s maximum ankle torque in slow walking, while keeping the weight of the device less than 2 kg. To reach such goal, the orthotic joint is actuated with a compact flat motor coupled with a two-stage transmission that provides a total 200:1 gear ratio. Additionally, a novel two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) joint design is incorporated. In addition to the powered dorsiflexion – plantarflexion, the 2-DOF joint also allows passive inversion – eversion of the joint, which greatly improves the comfort in the prolonged wearing of the device. For the control of the powered joint, a finite-state, friction-compensated impedance controller is developed to provide natural interaction with the user and reliable triggering of the powered push-off in walking. A prototype of the RAFO has been fabricated and assembled, and preliminary results demonstrated its effectiveness in assisting the user’s locomotion in treadmill walking experiments.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luciane Paula Batista Araújo de Oliveira ◽  
Sílvia Maria Azevedo dos Santos

ABSTRACT The study aimed to analyze the contextual conditions that influence the use of medications in elderly assisted in primary health care. Qualitative study with contribution of Grounded Theory, held in Santa Cruz, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, where 30 elderly patients on medications were interviewed . Data were coded and a model consisting of nine categories was generated. The two categories that explain the contextual conditions of the phenomenon are, Interacting with the support network and The concurrent use of medicines, teas, home remedies and faith, but only the latter is the subject of discussion in this article. To accommodate various treatments, the elderly tried to understand and compare their functions and exercise the faith in God. The act of reconciling different treatments is part of contextual conditions that influence the phenomenon studied, creating a set of circumstances to which these seniors accounted seeking strategies to deal with drug use in daily life.


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