Impact of mental and physical stress on blood pressure and pulse pressure under normobaric versus hypoxic conditions.

Objective: Hypobaric hypoxia, physical and psychosocial stress may influence key cardiovascular parameters including blood pressure (BP) and pulse pressure (PP). We investigated the effects of mild hypobaric hypoxia exposure on BP and PP reactivity to mental and physical stress and to passive elevation by cable car.

Methods: 36 healthy volunteers participated in a defined test procedure consisting of a period of rest 1, mental stress task (KLT-R), period of rest 2, combined mental (KLT-R) and physical task (bicycle ergometry) and a last period of rest both at Graz, Austria (353 m asl) and at the top station Dachstein (2700 m asl).

The effect of visual cues on the number and duration of freezing episodes in Parkinson's patients.

Freezing of gait is a phenomenon common in Parkinson's patients and significantly affects quality of life. Sensory cues have been known to improve walking performance and reduce freezing of gait. Visual cues are reported to be particularly effective for this purpose.

From simple receptors to complex multimodal percepts: a first global picture on the mechanisms involved in perceptual binding.

The binding problem in perception is concerned with answering the question how information from millions of sensory receptors, processed by millions of neurons working in parallel, can be merged into a unified percept. Binding in perception reaches from the lowest levels of feature binding up to the levels of multimodal binding of information coming from the different sensor modalities and also from other functional systems. The last 40 years of research have shown that the binding problem cannot be solved easily.

Variable Stiffness Structure for limb attachment.

In robotic rehabilitation, the way of attaching the robotic device to the users' limb constitutes a crucial element of product quality, particularly for assuring good fitting, comfort, accuracy, usability, and safety. In this article, we present a new technological concept - 'Variable Stiffness Structure' - allowing for an improvement of these aspects in the 'robotic device to limb' - connection by offering a compound of materials that are together able to switch from a flexible textile-like state to a more rigid state by applying negative pressure. The paper describes the concept and the basic behaviour of the material, based on experiments.

From single neuron-firing to consciousness--towards the true solution of the binding problem.

The human brain consists of millions of neural nerve cells being interconnected and firing in parallel in order to process information. A fundamental question is how this parallel neuron-firing can result in a unified experience. This is the so-called binding problem--a problem that is one of today's key questions about brain function and that has puzzled researchers for decades.