New kids on the CPET: age-appropriate outdoor cardiopulmonary exercise testing in preschoolers

Purpose Cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) in preschoolers (4–6 years) represents a challenge. Most studies investigating CPET have been limited to older children (> 8 year). However, knowledge of the performance of small children is essential for evaluating their cardiorespiratory fitness. This study strives to compare a modified Bruce protocol with a new age-appropriate incremental CPET during natural movement running outdoors, using a mobile device. Methods A group of 22 4–6-year-old healthy children was tested indoor on a treadmill (TM) using the modified Bruce protocol. The results were compared with a self-paced incremental running test, using a mobile CPET device in an outdoor park. The speeds were described as (1) slow walking, (2) slow running, (3) regular running, and (4) running with full speed as long as possible. Results Mean exercise time outdoors (6,57 min) was significantly shorter than on the treadmill (11,20 min), $$\dot{V}{O}_{2peak}$$ V ˙ O 2 p e a k (51.1 ml/min/kg vs. 40.1 ml/min/kg), RER (1.1 vs. 0.98) and important CPET parameters such as $$\dot{V}E$$ V ˙ E max, O2pulse, heart rate and breath rate were significantly higher outdoors. The submaximal parameter OUES was comparable between both the tests. Conclusions Testing very young children with a mobile device is a new alternative to treadmill testing. With a significantly shorter test duration, significantly higher values for almost all cardiopulmonary variables can be achieved without losing the ability to determine VT1 and VT2. It avoids common treadmill problems and allows for individualized exercise testing. The aim is to standardize exercise times with individual protocols instead of standardizing protocols with individual exercise times, allowing for better comparability.

Natural population movement and COVID-19: data from Russia

The COVID-19 pandemic is highly infectious, so it paralyzed the health systems of many countries causing a high mortality rate. Official data on COVID-19 deaths at many sites are questioned, and the figures are considered several times higher than official data. In this sense, the objective of the study was to determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the natural movement of the population and, in addition, to evaluate the real mortality rate from COVID-19 in Russia from the construction of predictive mortality models. The study used data from the World Health Organization and the Statistical Service of the Federal State of Russia; se used linear and polynomial models to construct mortality models. The study revealed an underestimation of the official COVID-19 death rate by 2.4 to 6.8 times, depending on the data source. There was a sharp increase in mortality in Russia in 2020 among people over 50 years of age, and with the increase in age, mortality increased. The main reasons for the sharp increase in mortality were coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular diseases, and respiratory diseases, among others.

Socio-geographic analysis of the demographic situation in Vinnytsia Oblast: current condition and peculiarities of development

The article contains analysis of the current demographic situation in Vinnytsia Oblast. We determined causes and factors influencing the development of the demographic situation in Vinnytsia Oblast. The paper reveals the specifics of development of the demographic processes in Vinnytsia Oblast according to the data of the Main Statistic Service in Vinnytsia Oblast for the period from 1959 to January 1, 2020. We determined how the totals of the urban and rural populations have changed. Based on the analysis of statistical and literature sources, we researched the specifics of natural movement of population, its sex and age structure, migration, distribution of the employed population and unemployment rate. We provide characteristics of specifics of the territorial differentiation of parameters of birth, death rates, natural increment (decline), migration, sex and age structure in Vinnytsia Oblast. We analyzed the specifics of employment of population in Vinnytsia Oblast, levels of economic activity and unemployment. We etermined modern tendencies of natural movement of the population, its impact on the prospects of further changes. We found out the problems of current demographic development in Vinnytsia Oblast based on determining modern specifics of the demographic parameters of the population in the researched area. The paper suggests ways to improve the demographic situation in Vinnytsia Oblast in the immediate future. As a result of the research, the demographic situation in Vinnytsia oblast was found to be negative. We observed a number of negative tendencies and patterns, including decrease in the rural population; decrease in the birth rate in the period from 1995 to 2020; high death rates due to diseases of blood circulation and malignant tumors; high parameters of aging of the population, especially in rural areas; decrease in the number of the employable population in the Oblast, etc.

Problems and opportunities for effective regulation of labor migration in the Republic of Uzbekistan

Demographic trends in Uzbekistan have a specific character associated with the active natural growth of the country's population (in the past 50 years, the country's population has increased by 2.86 times and amounted to 35 million people). In the early 1990s, there was an outflow of people to their historical homeland, the migration balance is still having a negative character. The article analyzes the gender and age composition of the population, changes in the dynamics of indicators of the natural movement of the population, in which the fertility rate decreases, life expectancy increases (73.4 years). The high proportion of young people (up to 60% in the population structure) and the annual high growth of labor resources (about 500 thousand people) creates a burden on the internal labor market. There is a significant flow of labor migration to foreign countries, in which the Russian Federation occupies a leading place. The article analyses of the current reforms in the field of regulation of labor migration, which have been significantly developed under the new government of the country (since 2016), including the establishment of organized forms of labor migration. There are highlighted the present main targets of the Government of Uzbekistan, to create conditions and mechanisms that contribute to ensuring managed and regulated migration flows, legitimate rights and interests of citizens of the country. The author analyzes the trends in the normative and legal regulation of the sphere of labor migration, the relevance of the development of a new draft "Law on External Labor Migration" aimed at improving the efficiency of state bodies in solving complex migration issues. There is shown the institutional reform of the Agency for External Labor Migration in the field of migration management. It is proposed to develop a Concept and Strategy of state policy in the field of labor migration, as basic documents relating migration for the future. There are proposed directions of reforms in the migration sphere, establishment of organized forms of labor migration, expansion of international cooperation, powers of various departments of the country, improvement of the system for collecting statistics and data analysis, and conducting scientific research in the migration sphere.

The Natural Movement of The Population in The Context of the Pandemic. Statistics at National Level Regarding Births, Deaths, Marriages and Divorces

The research in this article sheds light on issues related to the evolution of the national situation of the natural movement of the population from January 2019 to May 2021, given the registrations made at the civil registry services in Romania on births, deaths, marriages and divorces, aiming to make a comparison between the period before the pandemic and the period after its onset in our country, in March 2020. We want to see if the number of the four life events mentioned above was really influenced by the pandemic and thus increased or decreased significantly. Also, the study of the natural movement of the population in Romania, under the spectrum of the current health crisis is of major importance, given that the pandemic has visible effects on the acceleration of deaths in people with various comorbidities.

Neural tracking to go: auditory attention decoding and saliency detection with mobile EEG

Objective. Neuro-steered assistive technologies have been suggested to offer a major advancement in future devices like neuro-steered hearing aids. Auditory attention decoding methods would in that case allow for identification of an attended speaker within complex auditory environments, exclusively from neural data. Decoding the attended speaker using neural information has so far only been done in controlled laboratory settings. Yet, it is known that ever-present factors like distraction and movement are reflected in the neural signal parameters related to attention. Approach. Thus, in the current study we applied a two-competing speaker paradigm to investigate performance of a commonly applied EEG-based auditory attention decoding (AAD) model outside of the laboratory during leisure walking and distraction. Unique environmental sounds were added to the auditory scene and served as distractor events. Main results. The current study shows, for the first time, that the attended speaker can be accurately decoded during natural movement. At a temporal resolution of as short as 5-seconds and without artifact attenuation, decoding was found to be significantly above chance level. Further, as hypothesized, we found a decrease in attention to the to-be-attended and the to-be-ignored speech stream after the occurrence of a salient event. Additionally, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict neural correlates of distraction with a computational model of auditory saliency based on acoustic features. Conclusion. Taken together, our study shows that auditory attention tracking outside of the laboratory in ecologically valid conditions is feasible and a step towards the development of future neural-steered hearing aids.

Predicting proprioceptive cortical anatomy and neural coding with topographic autoencoders

Proprioception is one of the least understood senses yet fundamental for the control of movement. Even basic questions of how limb pose is represented in the somatosensory cortex are unclear. We developed a variational autoencoder with topographic lateral connectivity (topo-VAE) to compute a putative cortical map from a large set of natural movement data. Although not fitted to neural data, our model reproduces two sets of observations from monkey centre-out reaching: 1. The shape and velocity dependence of proprioceptive receptive fields in hand-centered coordinates despite the model having no knowledge of arm kinematics or hand coordinate systems. 2. The distribution of neuronal preferred directions (PDs) recorded from multi-electrode arrays. The model makes several testable predictions: 1. Encoding across the cortex has a blob-and-pinwheel-type geometry PDs. 2. Few neurons will encode just a single joint. Topo-VAE provides a principled basis for understanding of sensorimotor representations, and the theoretical basis of neural manifolds, with application the restoration of sensory feedback in brain-computer interfaces and the control of humanoid robots.

METHODICAL ASPECTS OF DEVELOPING TOOLKIT MODELING AND INFORMATION SUPPORT FOR THE FORMATION OF FORECASTS OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT OF REGIONS

According to Rosstat for 2020, the population of Russia as a result of its natural movement decreased by 688.7 thousand people. If the birth rate in relation to 2019 decreased by 3.0%, then mortality increased by 17.9%. For many regions of the country (oddly enough, in the first place of its European part), the situation turned out to be even more difficult. At the same time, heterogeneous factors had an impact on each other - a change in the age structure of the population, the COVID-19 pandemic, a decrease in real income, etc. Under these conditions, the problem of obtaining accurate predictive assessments of the situation development in order to develop government policies to improve it is updated. Objectively necessary is the introduction of relevant information systems built on the basis of integrated economic and mathematical models. In this regard, the article discusses the development and application of modern tools for analyzing and predicting the development of territorial systems, including demographic aspects. It is indicated that a significant factor is the development of the social infrastructure of the territory. A system of criteria and indicators are proposed to assess the impact of its level of development on demographic processes. In particular, areas such as health care, education, culture and leisure, housing, trade and services are considered. An approach to the formation of integral indicators in various areas of life of society and an example of developing regression equations based on them is presented. It is noted that in different regions of the country, the degree of influence of the level of development of social infrastructure on demographic processes may differ significantly, which requires accounting within the framework of the model being formed. The possibility and need to build a decision support system based on the obtained model complex and is defined by such a toolkit in the strategic development management system of the region. The key stages of developing tools are described. The results obtained can be used as part of modeling changes in the demographic potential of regions in the context of the transformation of the territorial settlement system.

SOME ISSUES OF FOOD SECURITY OF THE POPULATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF KAZAKHSTAN

. The article describes the natural potential, as well as the current level of development of domestic agriculture as the main source of food and raw materials for its manufacture, data on the number and natural movement of the rural population of the country. The results of research on the production and consumption of basic types of food per capita, carried out on the basis of official statistics and the Ministry of Agriculture, are also presented.

Multijoint passive elastic spine exoskeleton for stoop lifting assistance

In the task of carrying heavy objects, it is easy to cause back injuries and other musculoskeletal diseases. Although wearable robots are designed to reduce this danger, most existing exoskeletons use high-stiffness mechanisms, which are beneficial to load-bearing conduction, but this restricts the natural movement of the human body, thereby causing ergonomic risks. This article proposes a back exoskeleton composed of multiple elastic spherical hinges inspired by the biological spine. This spine exoskeleton can assist in the process of bending the body and ensure flexibility. We deduced the kinematics model of this mechanism and established an analytical biomechanical model of human–robot interaction. The mechanism of joint assistance of the spine exoskeleton was discussed, and experiments were conducted to verify the flexibility of the spine exoskeleton and the effectiveness of the assistance during bending.