scholarly journals Posture similarity index: a method to compare hand postures in synergy space

PeerJ ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e6078 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nayan Bhatt ◽  
Varadhan SKM

Background The human hand can perform a range of manipulation tasks, from holding a pen to holding a hammer. The central nervous system (CNS) uses different strategies in different manipulation tasks based on task requirements. Attempts to compare postures of the hand have been made for use in robotics and animation industries. In this study, we developed an index called the posture similarity index to quantify the similarity between two human hand postures. Methods Twelve right-handed volunteers performed 70 postures, and lifted and held 30 objects (total of 100 different postures, each performed five times). A 16-sensor electromagnetic tracking system captured the kinematics of individual finger phalanges (segments). We modeled the hand as a 21-DoF system and computed the corresponding joint angles. We used principal component analysis to extract kinematic synergies from this 21-DoF data. We developed a posture similarity index (PSI), that represents the similarity between posture in the synergy (Principal component) space. First, we tested the performance of this index using a synthetic dataset. After confirming that it performs well with the synthetic dataset, we used it to analyze the experimental data. Further, we used PSI to identify postures that are “representative” in the sense that they have a greater overlap (in synergy space) with a large number of postures. Results Our results confirmed that PSI is a relatively accurate index of similarity in synergy space both with synthetic data and real experimental data. Also, more special postures than common postures were found among “representative” postures. Conclusion We developed an index for comparing posture similarity in synergy space and demonstrated its utility by using synthetic dataset and experimental dataset. Besides, we found that “special” postures are actually “special” in the sense that there are more of them in the “representative” postures as identified by our posture similarity index.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nayan Bhatt ◽  
Varadhan SKM

Background The Human hand can perform a range of manipulation tasks, from holding a pen to holding a hammer. Central Nervous System (CNS) uses different strategies in different manipulation tasks based on task requirements. Several attempts to compare postures of the hand have been made. Some of these have been developed for use in Robotics and animation industries. In this study, we develop an index to quantify the similarity between two human hand postures, the posture similarity index. Methods Twelve right-handed volunteers performed 70 postures and lifted and held 30 objects (total of 100 different postures, each performed 5 times). Kinematics of individual finger phalanges (segments) were captured by using a 16-sensor electromagnetic tracking sensor system. The hand was modelled as a 21-DoF system and the corresponding joint angles were computed. We used principal component analysis to extract kinematic synergies from this 21-DoF data. We developed a posture similarity index (PSI), that represents similarity between posture in the synergy (Principal component) space. First, performance of this index was tested using a synthetic dataset. After confirming that it performs well with synthetic dataset, we used it to analyse experimental data. Further, we used PSI to identify postures that are representative in the sense that they have a greater overlap (in synergy space) with a large number of postures. Results Using synthetic data and real experimental data, it was found that PSI was a relatively accurate index of similarity in synergy space. Also, it was found that more special postures than common postures were found among “representative” postures. Conclusion An index for comparing posture similarity in synergy space has been developed and its use has been demonstrated using synthetic dataset and experimental dataset. In addition, we found that special postures are actually special in the sense that there are more of them in the “representative” postures as identified by our posture similarity index.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nayan Bhatt ◽  
Varadhan SKM

Background The Human hand can perform a range of manipulation tasks, from holding a pen to holding a hammer. Central Nervous System (CNS) uses different strategies in different manipulation tasks based on task requirements. Several attempts to compare postures of the hand have been made. Some of these have been developed for use in Robotics and animation industries. In this study, we develop an index to quantify the similarity between two human hand postures, the posture similarity index. Methods Twelve right-handed volunteers performed 70 postures and lifted and held 30 objects (total of 100 different postures, each performed 5 times). Kinematics of individual finger phalanges (segments) were captured by using a 16-sensor electromagnetic tracking sensor system. The hand was modelled as a 21-DoF system and the corresponding joint angles were computed. We used principal component analysis to extract kinematic synergies from this 21-DoF data. We developed a posture similarity index (PSI), that represents similarity between posture in the synergy (Principal component) space. First, performance of this index was tested using a synthetic dataset. After confirming that it performs well with synthetic dataset, we used it to analyse experimental data. Further, we used PSI to identify postures that are representative in the sense that they have a greater overlap (in synergy space) with a large number of postures. Results Using synthetic data and real experimental data, it was found that PSI was a relatively accurate index of similarity in synergy space. Also, it was found that more special postures than common postures were found among “representative” postures. Conclusion An index for comparing posture similarity in synergy space has been developed and its use has been demonstrated using synthetic dataset and experimental dataset. In addition, we found that special postures are actually special in the sense that there are more of them in the “representative” postures as identified by our posture similarity index.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramana Vinjamuri ◽  
Vrajeshri Patel ◽  
Michael Powell ◽  
Zhi-Hong Mao ◽  
Nathan Crone

Movement primitives or synergies have been extracted from human hand movements using several matrix factorization, dimensionality reduction, and classification methods. Principal component analysis (PCA) is widely used to obtain the first few significant eigenvectors of covariance that explain most of the variance of the data. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is also used as a supervised learning method to classify the hand postures corresponding to the objects grasped. Synergies obtained using PCA are principal component vectors aligned with dominant variances. On the other hand, synergies obtained using LDA are linear discriminant vectors that separate the groups of variances. In this paper, time varying kinematic synergies in the human hand grasping movements were extracted using these two diametrically opposite methods and were evaluated in reconstructing natural and American sign language (ASL) postural movements. We used an unsupervised LDA (ULDA) to extract linear discriminants. The results suggest that PCA outperformed LDA. The uniqueness, advantages, and disadvantages of each of these methods in representing high-dimensional hand movements in reduced dimensions were discussed.


Acta Naturae ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. V. Gusel’nikova ◽  
D. E. Korzhevskiy

The NeuN protein is localized in nuclei and perinuclear cytoplasm of most of the neurons in the central nervous system of mammals. Monoclonal antibodies to the NeuN protein have been actively used in the immunohistochemical research of neuronal differentiation to assess the functional state of neurons in norm and pathology for more than 20 years. Recently, NeuN antibodies have begun to be applied in the differential morphological diagnosis of cancer. However, the structure of the protein, which can be revealed by antibodies to NeuN, remained unknown until recently, and the functions of the protein are still not fully clear. In the present mini-review, data on NeuN accumulated so far are summarized and analyzed. Data on the structure and properties of the protein, its isoforms, intracellular localization, and hypothesized functions are reported. The application field of immunocytochemical detection of NeuN in scientific and clinical studies, as well as the difficulties in the interpretation of the obtained experimental data and their possible causes, is described in details.


Molecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 1546
Author(s):  
Ioanna Dagla ◽  
Anthony Tsarbopoulos ◽  
Evagelos Gikas

Colistimethate sodium (CMS) is widely administrated for the treatment of life-threatening infections caused by multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria. Until now, the quality control of CMS formulations has been based on microbiological assays. Herein, an ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to ultraviolet detector methodology was developed for the quantitation of CMS in injectable formulations. The design of experiments was performed for the optimization of the chromatographic parameters. The chromatographic separation was achieved using a Waters Acquity BEH C8 column employing gradient elution with a mobile phase consisting of (A) 0.001 M aq. ammonium formate and (B) methanol/acetonitrile 79/21 (v/v). CMS compounds were detected at 214 nm. In all, 23 univariate linear-regression models were constructed to measure CMS compounds separately, and one partial least-square regression (PLSr) model constructed to assess the total CMS amount in formulations. The method was validated over the range 100–220 μg mL−1. The developed methodology was employed to analyze several batches of CMS injectable formulations that were also compared against a reference batch employing a Principal Component Analysis, similarity and distance measures, heatmaps and the structural similarity index. The methodology was based on freely available software in order to be readily available for the pharmaceutical industry.


Data in Brief ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 107323
Author(s):  
Mohamed N.A. Meshref ◽  
Seyed Mohammad Mirsoleimani Azizi ◽  
Wafa Dastyar ◽  
Rasha Maal-Bared ◽  
Bipro Ranjan Dhar

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianyun Yuan ◽  
Yu (Wolf) Song ◽  
Gerald A. Kraan ◽  
Richard H. M. Goossens

Abstract Measuring the motion of human hand joints is a challenging task due to the high number of DOFs. In this study, we proposed a low-cost hand tracking system built on action cameras and ArUco markers to measure finger joint rotation angles. The lens distortion of each camera was corrected first via intra-calibration and the videos of different cameras were aligned to the reference camera using a dynamic time warping based method. Two methods were proposed and implemented for extracting the rotation angles of finger joints: one is based on the 3D positions of the markers via inter-calibration between cameras, named pos-based method; the other one is based on the relative marker orientation information from individual cameras, named rot-based method. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system. The right hand of a volunteer was included in this practical study, where the movement of the fingers was recorded and the finger rotation angles were calculated with the two proposed methods, respectively. The results indicated that although using the rot-based method may collect less data than using the pos-based method, it was more stable and reliable. Therefore, the rot-based method is recommended for measuring finger joint rotation in practical setups.


2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (10) ◽  
pp. 1233-1252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hoff ◽  
Alireza Ramezani ◽  
Soon-Jo Chung ◽  
Seth Hutchinson

In this article, we present methods to optimize the design and flight characteristics of a biologically inspired bat-like robot. In previous, work we have designed the topological structure for the wing kinematics of this robot; here we present methods to optimize the geometry of this structure, and to compute actuator trajectories such that its wingbeat pattern closely matches biological counterparts. Our approach is motivated by recent studies on biological bat flight that have shown that the salient aspects of wing motion can be accurately represented in a low-dimensional space. Although bats have over 40 degrees of freedom (DoFs), our robot possesses several biologically meaningful morphing specializations. We use principal component analysis (PCA) to characterize the two most dominant modes of biological bat flight kinematics, and we optimize our robot’s parametric kinematics to mimic these. The method yields a robot that is reduced from five degrees of actuation (DoAs) to just three, and that actively folds its wings within a wingbeat period. As a result of mimicking synergies, the robot produces an average net lift improvesment of 89% over the same robot when its wings cannot fold.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (14) ◽  
pp. 4948
Author(s):  
Marcel Neuhausen ◽  
Patrick Herbers ◽  
Markus König

Vision-based tracking systems enable the optimization of the productivity and safety management on construction sites by monitoring the workers’ movements. However, training and evaluation of such a system requires a vast amount of data. Sufficient datasets rarely exist for this purpose. We investigate the use of synthetic data to overcome this issue. Using 3D computer graphics software, we model virtual construction site scenarios. These are rendered for the use as a synthetic dataset which augments a self-recorded real world dataset. Our approach is verified by means of a tracking system. For this, we train a YOLOv3 detector identifying pedestrian workers. Kalman filtering is applied to the detections to track them over consecutive video frames. First, the detector’s performance is examined when using synthetic data of various environmental conditions for training. Second, we compare the evaluation results of our tracking system on real world and synthetic scenarios. With an increase of about 7.5 percentage points in mean average precision, our findings show that a synthetic extension is beneficial for otherwise small datasets. The similarity of synthetic and real world results allow for the conclusion that 3D scenes are an alternative to evaluate vision-based tracking systems on hazardous scenes without exposing workers to risks.


Author(s):  
MING-SHAUNG CHANG ◽  
JUNG-HUA CHOU

In this paper, we design a robust and friendly human–robot interface (HRI) system for our intelligent mobile robot based only on natural human gestures. It consists of a triple-face detection method and a fuzzy logic controller (FLC)-Kalman filter tracking system to check the users and predict their current position in a dynamic and cluttered working environment. In addition, through the combined classifier of the principal component analysis (PCA) and back-propagation artificial neural network (BPANN), single and successive commands defined by facial positions and hand gestures are identified for real-time command recognition after dynamic programming (DP). Therefore, the users can instruct this HRI system to make member recognition or expression recognition corresponding to their gesture commands, respectively based on the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and BPANN. The experimental results prove that the proposed HRI system perform accurately in real-time face detection and tracking, and robustly react to the corresponding gesture commands at eight frames per second (fps).


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