How to arrange the robotic environment? Leveraging experience in both motion planning and environment optimization.

This study presents an experience-based hierarchical-structure optimization algorithm to address the robotic system environment design problem, which combines motion planning and environment arrangement problems together. The motion planning problem, which could be defined as a multiple-degree-of-freedom (m-DOF) problem, together with the environment arrangement problem, which could be defined as a free DOF problem, is a high-dimensional optimization problem. Therefore, the hierarchical structure was established, with the higher layer solving the environment arrangement problem and lower layer solving the problem of motion planning.

Estimation of center of pressure information by smartphone sensors for postural control training.

Postural control training based on physical information is a common rehabilitation training method for patients with movement disorder. This research aims to verify the feasibility of using one smartphone embedded sensors to estimate CoP (Center of Pressure) displacement to take postural control training. We tested the reliability of smartphone sensor by motion capture system based on the following two CoP calculation models: (1) one-link inverted pendulum model; (2) two-link inverted pendulum model.

The Effect of Antihypertensive Therapy on Skeletal Muscle Mass and Bone Mineral Density in Patients With End-Stage Kidney Disease.

Objective: Sarcopenia and osteoporosis substantially influence health and lifespan. However, the variables affecting skeletal muscle mass (SMM) or bone mineral density (BMD) remain unknown.

Design And Methods: From August 1, 2018 to July 31, 2019, we conducted a single-center, observational cohort study with 291 Japanese adult patients on maintenance hemodialysis due to end-stage kidney disease, who had their femoral neck BMD measured using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry.

Method for analyzing sequential services using EEG: Micro-meso analysis of emotional changes in real flight service.

Capturing customers' emotional changes in sequential service should be realized using physiological measurements to assess customer delight. Questionnaire-based customer surveys may miss significant and dissipating emotional responses. This study developed a micro‑meso analysis method of capturing emotional changes for sequential service using electroencephalograph (EEG) measurement, dealing with both service encounters (micro-level) and servicescape (meso‑level) over a couple of hours.

Effect of experimentally induced plantar pain on trunk posture during gait.

[Purpose] Plantar pain is associated with the prevalence of low back pain. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that some kind of physical change should be occurring in the trunk due to plantar pain. However, the physical effect of plantar pain on the trunk remains unknown.

Effect of Sway Frequency on the Joint Angle and Center of Pressure in Voluntary Sway.

Voluntary sway is the periodic movement of one's body back and forth. The study aimed to clarify the effects of sway frequency on center of pressure and joint angle during voluntary sway. We measured 10 unrestricted voluntary sway conditions with different frequencies and natural pace conditions.

Peak vertical ground force of hand-knee crawling in human adults.

[Purpose] Fall risk is immanent in humans because they are bipedal. Bipedalism has transited from quadrupedalism in both evolutional and developmental contexts. Past studies have measured the peak vertical ground force of forelimbs and hindlimbs in quadrupedalism; and revealed that load dominancy shifted from forelimbs to hindlimbs during evolution.

Evaluation of expert skills in refinery patrol inspection: visual attention and head positioning behavior.

We aimed to clarify expert skills in refinery patrol inspection using data collected through a virtual reality experimental system. As body positioning and postural changes are relevant factors during refinery patrol inspection tasks, we measured and analyzed both visual attention and head positioning behavior among experts and "knowledgeable novices" who were engaged in the engineering of the refinery but had less inspection experience. The participants performed a simulated inspection task, and the results showed that 1) expert inspectors could find more defects compared to knowledgeable novices, 2) visual attention behavior was similar between knowledgeable novices and experts, and 3) experts tended to position their heads at various heights and further from the inspection target to obtain visual information more effectively from the target compared to knowledgeable novices.

Muscle synergy analysis yields an efficient and physiologically relevant method of assessing stroke.

The Fugl-Meyer Assessment is widely used to test motor function in stroke survivors. In the Fugl-Meyer Assessment, stroke survivors perform several movement tasks and clinicians subjectively rate the performance of each task item. The individual task items in the Fugl-Meyer Assessment are selected on the basis of clinical experience, and their physiological relevance has not yet been evaluated.

Outcome of the 'waiting until spontaneous extrusion' strategy for long-term tympanostomy tube placement in children with cleft palate.

Background: Otitis media with effusion (OME) in children with cleft palate (CP) is known to be refractory to treatment and most of these patients undergo surgery for ventilation tube (VT) placement.

Objectives: To identify the outcomes of children with CP using long-term VT with a 'waiting until spontaneous extrusion' strategy.

Material And Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of all children with CP who visited our department from December 2016 to November 2017 and who received long-term VT placement in our department.

A Neural Controller Model Considering the Vestibulospinal Tract in Human Postural Control.

Humans are able to control their posture in their daily lives. It is important to understand how this is achieved in order to understand the mechanisms that lead to impaired postural control in various diseases. The descending tracts play an important role in controlling posture, particularly the reticulospinal and the vestibulospinal tracts (VST), and there is evidence that the latter is impaired in various diseases.

Detection of unilateral and bilateral cleft alveolus on panoramic radiographs using a deep-learning system.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the difference in performance of deep-learning (DL) models with respect to the image classes and amount of training data to create an effective DL model for detecting both unilateral cleft alveoli (UCAs) and bilateral cleft alveoli (BCAs) on panoramic radiographs.

Methods: Model U was created using UCA and normal images, and Model B was created using BCA and normal images. Models C1 and C2 were created using the combined data of UCA, BCA, and normal images.

Mapping Oxidation and Wafer Cleaning to Device Characteristics Using Physics-Assisted Machine Learning.

It is always highly desired to have a well-defined relationship between the chemistry in semiconductor processing and the device characteristics. With the shrinkage of technology nodes in the semiconductors roadmap, it becomes more complicated to understand the relation between the device electrical characteristics and the process parameters such as oxidation and wafer cleaning procedures. In this work, we use a novel machine learning approach, i.

Evaluation of Postural Sway in Post-stroke Patients by Dynamic Time Warping Clustering.

Post-stroke complications are the second most frequent cause of death and the third leading cause of disability worldwide. The motor function of post-stroke patients is often assessed by measuring the postural sway in the patients during quiet standing, based on sway measures, such as sway area and velocity, which are obtained from temporal variations of the center of pressure. However, such approaches to establish a relationship between the sway measures and patients' demographic factors have hardly been successful (e.

Increase in muscle tone promotes the use of ankle strategies during perturbed stance.

Background: To maintain an upright standing posture against external disturbances, the human body mainly employs two types of postural control strategies: "ankle strategy" and "hip strategy." While it has been reported that the magnitude of the disturbance alters the use of postural control strategies, it has not been elucidated how the level of muscle tone, one of the crucial parameters of bodily function, determines the use of each strategy. We have previously confirmed using forward dynamics simulations of human musculoskeletal models that an increased muscle tone promotes the use of ankle strategies.

Towards a Simplified Estimation of Muscle Activation Pattern from MRI and EMG Using Electrical Network and Graph Theory.

Muscle functional MRI (mfMRI) is an imaging technique that assess muscles' activity, exploiting a shift in the T2-relaxation time between resting and active state on muscles. It is accompanied by the use of electromyography (EMG) to have a better understanding of the muscle electrophysiology; however, a technique merging MRI and EMG information has not been defined yet. In this paper, we present an anatomical and quantitative evaluation of the method our group introduced in to quantify its validity in terms of muscle pattern estimation for four subjects during four isometric tasks.

An Accurate and Efficient Voting Scheme for a Maximally All-Inlier 3D Correspondence Set.

We present a highly accurate and efficient, yet simple, two-stage voting scheme for distinguishing inlier 3D correspondences by densely assessing and ranking their local and global geometric consistencies. The strength of the proposed method stems from both the novel idea of post-validated voting set, as well as single-point superimposition transforms, which are computationally cheap and avoid rotational ambiguities. Using a well-known dataset consisting of various 3D models and numerous scenes that include different occlusion rates, the proposed scheme is evaluated against state-of-the-art 3D voting schemes, in terms of both the correspondence PR (precision-recall) AUC (area under curve), and the execution time.

Investigation of the effect of tonus on the change in postural control strategy using musculoskeletal simulation.

Background: Humans use different postural control strategies depending on perturbations. The shift from an ankle strategy to a hip strategy occurs at different perturbation magnitudes for different individuals. Although such differences relate to the differences in body parameters such as muscle strength, the parameter changes that affect the strategy shift are unclear.

Cross-feedback with Partner Contributes to Performance Accuracy in Finger-tapping Rhythm Synchronization between One Leader and Two Followers.

As observed in musical ensembles, people synchronize with a leader together with other people. This study aimed to investigate whether interdependency with a partner improves performance accuracy in rhythm synchronization with the leader. Participants performed a synchronization task via auditory signal by finger tapping in which two followers simultaneously synchronized with a leader: an isochronous metronome or a human leader with or without feedback from the followers.

Predicting anxiety state using smartphone-based passive sensing.

This study predicts the change of stress levels using real-world and online behavioral features extracted from smartphone log information. Previous studies of stress detection using smartphone data focused on a single feature and did not consider all features simultaneously. We propose a method to extract a co-occurring combination of a user's real-world and online behavioral features by converting raw sensor data into categorical features.

Postural control of a musculoskeletal model against multidirectional support surface translations.

The human body is a complex system driven by hundreds of muscles, and its control mechanisms are not sufficiently understood. To understand the mechanisms of human postural control, neural controller models have been proposed by different research groups, including our feed-forward and feedback control model. However, these models have been evaluated under forward and backward perturbations, at most.