Treadmill gait speeds correlate with physical activity counts measured by cell phone accelerometers.

A number of important health-related outcomes are directly related to a person's ability to maintain normal gait speed. We hypothesize that cellular telephones may be repurposed to measure this important behavior in a noninvasive, continuous, precise, and inexpensive manner. The purpose of this study was to determine if physical activity (PA) counts collected by cell phone accelerometers could measure treadmill gait speeds.

Anti-saccade performance predicts executive function and brain structure in normal elders.

Objective: To assess the neuropsychological and anatomical correlates of anti-saccade (AS) task performance in normal elders.

Background: The AS task correlates with neuropsychological measures of executive function and frontal lobe volume in neurological diseases, but has not been studied in a well-characterized normal elderly population. Because executive dysfunction can indicate an increased risk for cognitive decline in cognitively normal elders, we hypothesized that AS performance might be a sensitive test of age-related processes that impair cognition.

Cellular telephones measure activity and lifespace in community-dwelling adults: proof of principle.

Objectives: To describe a system that uses off-the-shelf sensor and telecommunication technologies to continuously measure individual lifespace and activity levels in a novel way.

Design: Proof of concept involving three field trials of 30, 30, and 21 days.

Setting: Omaha, Nebraska, metropolitan and surrounding rural region.

Oculomotor function in frontotemporal lobar degeneration, related disorders and Alzheimer's disease.

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) often overlaps clinically with corticobasal syndrome (CBS) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), both of which have prominent eye movement abnormalities. To investigate the ability of oculomotor performance to differentiate between FTLD, Alzheimer's disease, CBS and PSP, saccades and smooth pursuit were measured in three FTLD subtypes, including 24 individuals with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), 19 with semantic dementia (SD) and six with progressive non-fluent aphasia (PA), as compared to 28 individuals with Alzheimer's disease, 15 with CBS, 10 with PSP and 27 control subjects. Different combinations of oculomotor abnormalities were identified in all clinical syndromes except for SD, which had oculomotor performance that was indistinguishable from age-matched controls.