Real-Time Control of a Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Mirror Myoelectric Interface During Functional Task Training.

Motor learning mediated by motor training has in the past been explored for rehabilitation. Myoelectric interfaces together with exoskeletons allow patients to receive real-time feedback about their muscle activity. However, the number of degrees of freedom that can be simultaneously controlled is limited, which hinders the training of functional tasks and the effectiveness of the rehabilitation therapy.

Men's feelings and emotions in the Covid-19 framing.

Objective: to understand how men's feelings and emotions contribute to the Covid-19 framing in Brazil.

Method: Asocial-historical, qualitative study, carried out with 200 men resident in Brazil, through online search on digital platform.The grasped data were analyzed by the Collective Subject Discourse method in the light of the reference of epidemic disease proposed by Charles Rosemberg.

Brain oscillatory activity as a biomarker of motor recovery in chronic stroke.

In the present work, we investigated the relationship of oscillatory sensorimotor brain activity to motor recovery. The neurophysiological data of 30 chronic stroke patients with severe upper-limb paralysis are the basis of the observational study presented here. These patients underwent an intervention including movement training based on combined brain-machine interfaces and physiotherapy of several weeks recorded in a double-blinded randomized clinical trial.

Event-related desynchronization during movement attempt and execution in severely paralyzed stroke patients: An artifact removal relevance analysis.

The electroencephalogram (EEG) constitutes a relevant tool to study neural dynamics and to develop brain-machine interfaces (BMI) for rehabilitation of patients with paralysis due to stroke. However, the EEG is easily contaminated by artifacts of physiological origin, which can pollute the measured cortical activity and bias the interpretations of such data. This is especially relevant when recording EEG of stroke patients while they try to move their paretic limbs, since they generate more artifacts due to compensatory activity.

Complex Upper-Limb Movements Are Generated by Combining Motor Primitives that Scale with the Movement Size.

The hand trajectory of motion during the performance of one-dimensional point-to-point movements has been shown to be marked by motor primitives with a bell-shaped velocity profile. Researchers have investigated if motor primitives with the same shape mark also complex upper-limb movements. They have done so by analyzing the magnitude of the hand trajectory velocity vector.

Stroke lesion location influences the decoding of movement intention from EEG.

Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of brain-machine interfaces (BMI) for motor rehabilitation after stroke, especially for those patients with severe paralysis. However, a cerebro-vascular accident can affect the brain in many different manners, and lesions in diverse areas, even from significantly different volumes, can lead to similar or equal motor deficits. The location of the insult influences the way the brain activates when moving or attempting to move a paralyzed limb.

Movement-related brain oscillations vary with lesion location in severely paralyzed chronic stroke patients.

In the past few years, innovative upper-limb rehabilitation methods have been proposed for chronic stroke patients. These methods aim at functional motor rehabilitation using Brain-machine interfaces to constitute an alternate pathway from the brain to the muscles. Even in patients with absence of residual finger movements, recovery could be achieved.

Mercury speciation in plankton from the Cabo Frio Bay, SE--Brazil.

Mercury (Hg) is considered a global pollutant, and the scientific community has shown great concern about its toxicity as it may affect the biota of entire systems, through bioaccumulation and bioamplification processes of its organic form, methylmercury (MeHg), along food web. However, few research studies deal with bioaccumulation of Hg from marine primary producers and the first-order consumers. So, this study aims to determine Hg distribution and concentration levels in phytoplankton and zooplankton in the Cabo Frio Bay, Brazil, a site influenced by coastal upwelling.

Mercury deposition during the previous century in an upwelling region; Cabo Frio, Brazil.

To investigate the upwelling influence on Hg biogeochemical cycles and the sedimentological changes during the previous ≈ 150 years, four sediment box-cores were sampled along an inshore offshore transect on the Southeastern Brazilian continental shelf. Mercury values were found to be relatively low, with means ranging between 8.08 and 30.