EXPLORATION OF VIBROTACTILE BIOFEEDBACK STRATEGIES TO INDUCE STANCE TIME ASYMMETRIES

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael Escamilla-Nunez ◽  
Harry Sivasambu ◽  
Jan Andrysek

BACKGROUND: Gait symmetry is the degree of equality of biomechanical parameters between limbs within a gait cycle. Human gait is highly symmetrical; however, in the presence of pathology, gait often lacks symmetry. Biofeedback (BFB) systems have demonstrated the potential to reduce gait asymmetry, improve gait function, and benefit overall long-term musculoskeletal health. OBJECTIVE(S): The aim of this study was to develop a BFB system and evaluate three unique BFB strategies, including bidirectional control – constant vibration (BC), bidirectional control – variable vibration (BV), and unidirectional control – variable vibration (UV) relevant to gait symmetry. The assessed feedback strategies were a combination of vibration frequency/amplitude levels, vibration thresholds, and vibrotactile stimuli from one and two vibrating motors (tactors). Learning effect and short-term retention were also assessed. METHODOLOGY: Testing was performed using a custom BFB system that induces stance time asymmetries to modulate temporal gait symmetry. The BFB system continuously monitors specific gait events (heel-strike and toe-off) and calculates the symmetry ratio, based on the stance time of both limbs to provide real-time biomechanical information via the vibrating motors. Overall walking performance of ten (n=10) able-bodied individuals (age 24.8 ± 4.4 years) was assessed via metrics of symmetry ratio, symmetry ratio error, walking speed, and motor's vibration percentages. FINDINGS: All participants utilized BFB somatosensory information to modulate their symmetry ratio. UV feedback produced a greater change in symmetry ratio, and it came closer to the targeted symmetry ratio. Learning or short-term retention effects were minimal. Walking speeds were reduced with feedback compared to no feedback; however, UV walking speeds were significantly faster compared to BV and BC. CONCLUSION: The outcomes of this study provide new insights into the development and implementation of feedback strategies for gait retraining BFB systems that may ultimately benefit individuals with pathological gait. Future work should assess longer-term use and long-term learning and retention effects of BFB systems in the populations of interest. Layman's Abstract Healthy walking is usually highly symmetrical with the same movements occurring on both sides of the body. However, certain disorders can cause abnormal and asymmetrical walking movements. Biofeedback can improve the movements during walking. This study used a custom biofeedback system to test three ways of applying biofeedback including having one and two motors that vibrated in unique ways. The biofeedback system was set up to guide participants to change their normal walking pattern to be less symmetrical. Walking movements of ten young able-bodied individuals were measured while walking with the biofeedback system. The results showed a change in walking symmetry for all participants. Using a single vibrating motor resulted in the greatest changes in walking symmetry. The changes in walking symmetry occurred only when using biofeedback, and walking patterns quickly returned to normal when the biofeedback was turned off. Overall, all feedback methods caused the users to walk slower than their typical walking speed. These findings provide important new information about the changes in walking caused by different biofeedback methods. Future work should evaluate long-term effects of biofeedback methods in the populations of interest. Article PDF Link: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cpoj/article/view/36744/28677 How To Cite: Escamilla-Nunez R, Sivasambu H, Andrysek J. Exploration of vibrotactile biofeedback strategies to induce stance time asymmetries. Canadian Prosthetics & Orthotics Journal. 2022; Volume 5, Issue 1, No.2. https://doi.org/10.33137/cpoj.v5i1.36744 Corresponding Author: Rafael Escamilla-Nunez, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.E-Mail: [email protected] ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2739-878X

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 302-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regan A. R. Gurung ◽  
Jana Hackathorn

The introductory psychology (Intro Psych) course is the bedrock of the psychology major and the front face of our discipline. The class not only provides a foundation for students in the major but also provides a comprehensive portrait of the discipline for nonmajors. Despite a sizable body of research focused on pedagogy related to the introductory class, there are many questions that remain unanswered. We provide a comprehensive review of scholarship related to the Intro Psych course and discuss current practices and concerns related to textbook options, as well as teaching methods, course design, assignments to help students learn, and students’ learning outcomes. Finally, we provide five major suggestions for future work. We charge researchers to identify major bottlenecks to learning, design multisite studies, measure moderators of learning, assess long-term retention, and design/assess different models of teaching Intro Psych.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Kim Foong Jee ◽  
Jia En Joanne Ngui ◽  
Pei Pei Jessica Poh ◽  
Wai Loon Chan ◽  
Yet Siang Wong

This paper examines the relationship between capital structure and performance of firms. The study is confined to plantation sector companies in Malaysia and is based on a sample of 39 firms which listed in Bursa Malaysia for the period from 2009 to 2019. This study uses two performance measures which are ROA and ROE as the dependent variable. Besides, the capital structure measures are the short-term debt, long-term debt, total debt and firm growth, which as the independent variables. Size will be the control variable in this study. Moreover, a fixed-effect panel regression analysis has been used to analyse the impact of capital structure on firm performance. The results indicate that firm performance, which is in term of ROA, have an insignificant relationship with short-term debt (STD) and long-term debt (LTD). For the total debt (TD) and growth, there is a significant relationship with ROA. However, for the performance measured by ROE, it has an insignificant relationship with short-term debt (STD), long-term debt (LTD) and total debt (TD). Furthermore, there is a significant relationship between the growth and the performance firms from plantation sector in Malaysia.


1975 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. T. Turvey ◽  
Robert A. Weeks

Under the conditions of the distractor paradigm, short-term retention declines to a minimum in a very brief period. The rapid forgetting can be said to reflect the declining contribution of the short-term store or primary memory and the asymptote can be taken as a measure of the contribution of the long-term store or secondary memory. It was shown that manipulating proactive effects by varying the recency of prior material affected only the primary memory component of the short-term retention function. On the other hand manipulating the difficulty of the subsidiary task performed during the retention period with proactive effects held constant affected both the primary and the secondary components. The results were discussed with respect to the relation between the two memory components and the idea that proactive effects are limited to long-term store.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Salim Surani ◽  
Raghu Reddy ◽  
Amy E. Houlihan ◽  
Brenda Parrish ◽  
Gina L. Evans-Hudnall ◽  
...  

Introduction. Cigarette smoking contributes to the deaths of more than 400,000 Americans annually. Each day >3,000 children and adolescents become regular smokers. This paper details a new antitobacco educational program titled “AntE Tobacco”Method. Children in grades 1–3 were administered a 10-item questionnaire to ascertain their baseline knowledge about the ill effects of smoking, shown an educational cartoon video depicting the ill effects of tobacco, and given a story book based on the video. At the end of video, children were administered a questionnaire to determine short-term recall of the antitobacco educational objectives of the program. Four to 6 weeks later, the children were then administered a follow-up survey to determine long-term retention of the anti tobacco educational program.Result. Eighty two percent of the children answered the outcome questions correctly immediately following the video. At follow-up, 4–6 weeks later, 83% of children answered all questions correctly.Conclusion. The anti tobacco education program used in this study effectively conveyed most of the educational objectives. The results of this study indicate that a multimedia (i.e., video and book) educational program can be used to educate and reinforce anti tobacco messages. This program may be very useful as a part of a comprehensive anti tobacco curriculum in school systems.


1975 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. H. Bruning ◽  
I. Holzbauer ◽  
C. Kimberlin

1966 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Conrad ◽  
A. J. Hull

It has been proposed that a single set of operations based on classical interference theory is adequate to describe the phenomena of both short- and long-term memory. An article by Keppel and Underwood (1962) argues that short-term forgetting is due to proactive interference and, by implication, not a result of trace decay. An experiment which varied retention interval and the nature of the interpolated task, gave results which indicate that when the amount forgotten and the nature of errors are considered, a decay model is supported, the proactive interference suggestion being untenable.


2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (6S) ◽  
pp. 1712-1725 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mara Steinberg Lowe ◽  
Adam Buchwald

Purpose This study investigated whether whole nonword accuracy, phoneme accuracy, and acoustic duration measures were influenced by the amount of feedback speakers without impairment received during a novel speech motor learning task. Method Thirty-two native English speakers completed a nonword production task across 3 time points: practice, short-term retention, and long-term retention. During practice, participants received knowledge of results feedback according to a randomly assigned schedule (100%, 50%, 20%, or 0%). Changes in nonword accuracy, phoneme accuracy, nonword duration, and initial-cluster duration were compared among feedback groups, sessions, and stimulus properties. Results All participants improved phoneme and whole nonword accuracy at short-term and long-term retention time points. Participants also refined productions of nonwords, as indicated by a decrease in nonword duration across sessions. The 50% group exhibited the largest reduction in duration between practice and long-term retention for nonwords with native and nonnative clusters. Conclusions All speakers, regardless of feedback schedule, learned new speech motor behaviors quickly with a high degree of accuracy and refined their speech motor skills for perceptually accurate productions. Acoustic measurements may capture more subtle, subperceptual changes that may occur during speech motor learning. Supplemental Materials https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5116324


Author(s):  
Celal Demirkol ◽  
Ali Faruk Acikgoz

As an alternative source of financing the assets, bank credits have ever been on the spot of business finance and financial analysis. Those sources of financing have mostly compared with the short-term appearance of either liabilities or liquidity. The relevant finance literature ensures that the long-term appearance of bank credits in the balance sheets of businesses is not only affected by the composition of short-term liabilities but also the liquidity. Nevertheless, bank credit usage, especially in the long-term, may have different characteristics amongst sectors. Some sectors may even deserve a thorough analysis in their challenge of bank credit finance. The fishing sector and the businesses which it contains may have been neglected in terms of revealing the causalities which might have been hidden by considering its aspects as a supplement in the aggregate figures of the agriculture sector in Turkey. Thus, this study aims at the core debt and liability variables along with a liquidity control variable, cash and cash equivalents or cash, to reveal the causality and cointegration aspects on the long-term bank credit potential in the nexus of these two inter-related sectors. We hereby compare the results of the model designed for the study in between fishing and agriculture sectors in Turkey for the time span of available and comparable data which has been represented by the Central Bank of Turkey as a part of nonfinancial or real sector data from 1996 up to 2009. The findings depict that fishing sector, unlikely to agriculture sector in which it is generally added and forced to share the same investment atmosphere of incentives, policy implications, and attitudes of the creditors, does have different features in terms of long-term bank credit usage. Cash and cash equivalents are not significant regressors for the agriculture sector, however, fishing sector has evidence in the long-run that cash and cash equivalents have noteworthy impact in the long-term bank credits. The results of the study will therefore help both the decisions on the creditors’ and fishing sector sides enriching the profound details and sector specific reasoning for which an aggregate point of view where fishing sector is seen as a part of agriculture sector could not reflect the sector’s characteristics on the path to develop the fishing sector and the businesses therein. We also believe that this study will present evidence for any policies and incentives in promoting new investments in the fishing sector of Turkey.


Author(s):  
Norehan Zulkiply ◽  
Jennifer S Burt

Purpose – The present study investigated whether or not the benefits of interleaving of exemplars from several categories vary with retention interval in inductive learning.   Methodology – Two experiments were conducted using paintings (Experiment 1) and textual materials (Experiment 2), and the experiments used a mixed factorial design. Forty students participated in each experiment for course credit. In each experiment, participants studied a series of exemplars from several categories which were presented massed and interleaved, and later their induction was tested either shortly after the study phase (short-term retention) or after a week’s delay (long- term retention).   Findings – Consistent with findings from previous studies, the interleaving effect was found in the short-term retention condition, and crucially, the present study provided the initial evidence that interleaving of exemplars also affected long-term retention. Interestingly, massing was judged to be more effective than spacing (interleaving) in most groups, even when actual performance showed the opposite.   Significance – The present study shows that interleaved exemplars have considerable potential in improving inductive learning in the long term. For example, induction is used in case-based reasoning which requires one to start with learning from specifi c cases, and then form generalizations of these cases by identifying the commonalities between them. In order to enhance long-term retention, educators may want to consider using interleaved presentation rather than massed presentation in teaching examples or cases from a particular category or concept.


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