A wearable system to assist impaired-neck patients: Design and evaluation.

Patients with neurological disorders, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and cerebral palsy, often face challenges due to head-neck immobility. The conventional treatment approach involves using a neck collar to maintain an upright head position, but this can be cumbersome and restricts head-neck movements over prolonged periods. This study introduces a wearable robot capable of providing three anatomical head motions for training and assistance.

EMG-driven fatigue-based self-adapting admittance control of a hand rehabilitation robot.

Upper-limb rehabilitation therapy sessions for post-stroke people generally contain rhythmic hand movements in a tiresome manner to rebuild the injured neural circuits. Fatigue formation causes breaks in the training and limits the therapy duration. Therefore, it is essential to establish a correlation between the patient's muscle condition and the rehabilitation exercises to improve the physiotherapy sessions.

Nonlinear time delay estimation based model reference adaptive impedance control for an upper-limb human-robot interaction.

A nonlinear Time Delay Estimation (TDE) based model reference adaptive impedance controller was developed for Tarbiat Modares University Upper Limbs Rehabilitation Robot (TUERR). The proposed controller uses a stable reference impedance model, which produces desired dynamic relationship between applied force and position error for the robot End-effector to track the desired trajectory. TDE based model reference adaptive controller estimates unknown system dynamics and uncertainties, and the adaption law modifies the controller gains.

A novel zero delay low pass filter: Application to precision positioning systems.

In this paper, a nonlinear low-pass filter is presented, which produces significantly less phase lag than linear and some nonlinear filters. The proposed filter employs a saturation function to enhance the linear filter's performance. The gain and phase responses of the filter are derived analytically using a modified describing function, and the efficiency of the proposed method is examined through numerical examples.

Adding ursodeoxycholic acid to the endoscopic treatment and common bile duct stenting for large and multiple biliary stones: Will it improve the outcomes?

Background: The role of common bile duct (CBD) stenting in the establishment of bile stream in the elderly patients and the ones who are not good candidates for surgery due to not responding to treatments was well documented in previous studies. The current study aimed at investigating the effect of adding Ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) to CBD stenting alone in order to reduce the size of large and multiple CBD stones.

Methods: Clinical outcomes including success rates in CBD stones clearance, incidence of pancreatitis, perforation, bleeding, as well as, decrease in size of stones and liver enzymes after a two-month period were assessed in the UDCA + CBD stenting group.

A Poincare map based analysis of stroke patients' walking after a rehabilitation by a robot.

Since the past decade, rehabilitation robots have become common technologies for recovering gait ability after a stroke. Nevertheless, it is believed that these robots can be further enhanced. Hence, several researches are making progress in optimizing gait rehabilitation robots.

Interaction of Piscidin-1 with zwitterionic versus anionic membranes: a comparative molecular dynamics study.

Plasma membrane of each micro-organism has a unique set of lipid composition as a consequence of the environmental adaptation or a response to exposure to antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) as antibiotic agents. Understanding the relationship between lipid composition and action of antimicrobial peptides or considering how different lipid bilayers respond to AMPs may help us design more effective peptide drugs in the future. In this contribution, we intend to elucidate how two currently used membrane models, namely palmitoyl-oleoyl-phosphtidylglycerol (POPG) and 1-palmitoyl-oleoyl-glycero-phosphocholine (POPC), respond to antimicrobial peptide Piscidin-1 (Pis-1).

Avian influenza virus monitoring in wintering waterbirds in Iran, 2003-2007.

Background: Virological, molecular and serological studies were carried out to determine the status of infections with avian influenza viruses (AIV) in different species of wild waterbirds in Iran during 2003-2007. Samples were collected from 1146 birds representing 45 different species with the majority of samples originating from ducks, coots and shorebirds. Samples originated from 6 different provinces representative for the 15 most important wintering sites of migratory waterbirds in Iran.

Structural studies of SNARE complex and its interaction with complexin by molecular dynamics simulation.

Since neurotransmitter releasing into the synaptic space delivers electrical signals from presynaptic neural cell to the postsynaptic cell, neurotransmitter secretion must be much orchestrated. Crowded intracellular vesicles involving neurotransmitters present a question of the how secretory vesicles fuse onto the plasma membrane in a fast synchronized fashion. Complexin is one of the most experimentally studied proteins that regulate assembly of fusogenic four-helix SNARE complex to synchronized neurotransmitter secretion.

The role of short-range Cys171-Cys178 disulfide bond in maintaining cutinase active site integrity: a molecular dynamics simulation.

Understanding structural determinants in enzyme active site integrity can provide a good knowledge to design efficient novel catalytic machineries. Fusarium solani pisi cutinase with classic triad Ser-His-Asp is a promising enzyme to scrutinize these structural determinants. We performed two MD simulations: one, with the native structure, and the other with the broken Cys171-Cys178 disulfide bond.

Role of disulfide bonds in modulating internal motions of proteins to tune their function: molecular dynamics simulation of scorpion toxin Lqh III.

A series of 1-ns MD simulations were performed on the scorpion toxin Lqh III in native and disulfide bond broken states. The removal of disulfide bonds has caused hydrogen bond network alteration in the five-residue turn, the long loop, the alpha-helix, the loop connecting strands II and III, and the C-terminal region. In addition and more importantly, it has influenced the amplitude of the fluctuations of five-residue turn, loops, and C-terminal region with a minor effect on the fluctuations of the cysteines in the broken bond sites.