Toward improving residual limb climate within prostheses for persons with lower limb loss: a technical note.

Background: Individuals with lower limb loss often wear a gel liner and enclosed socket for connecting to a terminal prosthetic device. Historically, a significant limitation to traditional liners and sockets is that they are thermal insulators, thereby trapping heat and moisture within, which can lead to numerous deleterious issues, including loss of suspension and residual limb skin problems, and, in turn, reductions in mobility, function, and overall quality of life. To mitigate these issues, new approaches are therefore needed to enhance the residual limb climate (e.

Bimodal ankle-foot prosthesis for enhanced standing stability.

Previous work suggests that to restore postural stability for individuals with lower-limb amputation, ankle-foot prostheses should be designed with a flat effective rocker shape for standing. However, most commercially available ankle-foot prostheses are designed with a curved effective rocker shape for walking. To address the demands of both standing and walking, we designed a novel bimodal ankle-foot prosthesis that can accommodate both functional modes using a rigid foot plate and an ankle that can lock and unlock.

Household Clustering of Sequence Type 131 Clinical and Fecal Isolates According to Whole Genome Sequence Analysis.

 Within-household sharing of strains from the resistance-associated 30R1 and 30Rx subclones of sequence type 131 (ST131) has been inferred based on conventional typing data, but it has been assessed minimally using whole genome sequence (WGS) analysis.  Thirty-three clinical and fecal isolates of ST131-30R1 and ST131-30Rx, from 20 humans and pets in 6 households, underwent WGS analysis for comparison with 52 published ST131 genomes. Phylogenetic relationships were inferred using a bootstrapped maximum likelihood tree based on core genome sequence polymorphisms.