Multiple sclerosis and related disorders
Dec 12, 2016
BACKGROUND: People with multiple sclerosis (MS) often develop symptoms including muscle weakness, spasticity, imbalance, and sensory loss in the lower limbs, especially at the ankle, which result in impaired balance and locomotion and increased risk ...
This paper introduces approximate time-domain solutions to the otherwise non-integrable double-stance dynamics of the 'bipedal' spring-loaded inverted pendulum (B-SLIP) in the presence of non-negligible damping. We first introduce an auxiliary system...
Elderly are confronted with reduced physical capabilities and increased metabolic energy cost of walking. Exoskeletons that assist walking have the potential to restore walking capacity by reducing the metabolic cost of walking. However, it is unclea...
Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology
Nov 18, 2016
An information-based technique is described for applications in mechanical property imaging of soft biological media under quasi-static loads. We adapted the Autoprogressive method that was originally developed for civil engineering applications for ...
The spine journal : official journal of the North American Spine Society
Nov 17, 2016
BACKGROUND CONTEXT: There have been conflicting results on the surgical outcome of lumbar fusion surgery using two different techniques: robot-assisted pedicle screw fixation and conventional freehand technique. In addition, there have been no studie...
Several arboreal mammals have the ability to rapidly and repeatedly jump vertical distances of 2 m, starting from rest. We characterize this performance by a metric we call vertical jumping agility. Through basic kinetic relations, we show that this ...
Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation
Nov 14, 2016
BACKGROUND: Cerebral Palsy (CP) is a disorder of posture and movement due to a defect in the immature brain. The use of robotic devices as alternative treatment to improve the gait function in patients with CP has increased. Nevertheless, current gai...
We propose the architecture of a novel robot system merging biological and artificial intelligence based on a neural controller connected to an external agent. We initially built a framework that connected the dissociated neural network to a mobile r...
Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
Oct 29, 2016
Inspired by the oscillatory nature of cerebral cortex activity, we recently proposed and studied self-organizing maps (SOMs) based on limit cycle neural activity in an attempt to improve the information efficiency and robustness of conventional singl...
The lack of haptic feedback in robotics-assisted surgery can result in tissue damage or accidental tool-tissue hits. This paper focuses on exploring the effect of haptic feedback via direct force reflection and visual presentation of force magnitudes...