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Robot-Assisted Rehabilitation (RAR) is relevant for treating patients affected by nervous system injuries (e.g., stroke and spinal cord injury). The accurate estimation of the joint angles of the patient limbs in RAR is critical to assess the patient improvement. The economical prevalent method to estimate the patient posture in Exoskeleton-based RAR is to approximate the limb joint angles with the ones of the Exoskeleton. This approximation is rough since their kinematic structures differ. Motion capture systems (MOCAPs) can improve the estimations, at the expenses of a considerable overload of the therapy setup. Alternatively, the Extended Inverse Kinematics Posture Estimation (EIKPE) computational method models the limb and Exoskeleton as differing parallel kinematic chains. EIKPE has been tested with single DOF movements of the wrist and elbow joints. This paper presents the assessment of EIKPE with elbow-shoulder compound movements (i.e., object prehension). Ground-truth for estimation assessment is obtained from an optical MOCAP (not intended for the treatment stage). The assessment shows EIKPE rendering a good numerical approximation of the actual posture during the compound movement execution, especially for the shoulder joint angles. This work opens the horizon for clinical studies with patient groups, Exoskeleton models, and movements types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring stride variability and dynamics in children is useful for the quantitative study of gait maturation and neuromotor development in childhood and adolescence. In this paper, we computed the sample entropy (SampEn) and average stride interval (ASI) parameters to quantify the stride series of 50 gender-matched children participants in three age groups. We also normalized the SampEn and ASI values by leg length and body mass for each participant, respectively. Results show that the original and normalized SampEn values consistently decrease over the significance level of the Mann-Whitney U test (p<0.01) in children of 3–14 years old, which indicates the stride irregularity has been significantly ameliorated with the body growth. The original and normalized ASI values are also significantly changing when comparing between any two groups of young (aged 3–5 years), middle (aged 6–8 years), and elder (aged 10–14 years) children. Such results suggest that healthy children may better modulate their gait cadence rhythm with the development of their musculoskeletal and neurological systems. In addition, the AdaBoost.M2 and Bagging algorithms were used to effectively distinguish the children’s gait patterns. These ensemble learning algorithms both provided excellent gait classification results in terms of overall accuracy (≥90%), recall (≥0.8), and precision (≥0.8077). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives. Adverse conditions in the prenatal environment and in the first years of life are independently associated with increased risk for cardiovascular disease. This paper aims to study the relation between birthweight, growth in the first year of life, and subclinical atherosclerosis in adults. Methods. 88 adults aged between 20 and 31 were submitted to sociodemographic qualities, anthropometric data, blood pressure measurements, metabolic profile, and evaluation of subclinical atherosclerosis. Results. Birthweight <2,500 grams (g) was negatively correlated with (a) increased waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), according to regression coefficient (RC) equal to −0.323, 95% CI [−0.571, −0.075] P<0.05; (b) diastolic blood pressure (RC = −4.744, 95% CI [−9.017, −0.470] P<0.05); (c) low HDL-cholesterol (RC = −0.272, 95% CI [−0.516, −0.029] P<0.05); (d) frequency of intima-media thickness (IMT) of left carotid >75th percentile (RC = −0.242, 95% CI [−0.476, −0.008] P<0.05). Birthweight >3,500 g was associated with (a) BMI >25.0 kg/m2, (RC = 0.317, 95% CI [0.782, 0.557] P<0.05); (b) increased waist circumference (RC = 0.284, 95% CI [0.054, 0.513] P<0.05); (c) elevated WHR (RC = 0.280, 95% CI [0.054, 0.505] P<0.05); (d) minimum subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) (RC = 4.354, 95% CI [0.821, 7.888] P<0.05); (e) maximum SAT (RC = 7.095, 95% CI [0.608, 13.583] P<0.05); (f) right lobe of the liver side (RC = 6.896, 95% CI [1.946, 11.847] P<0.001); (g) frequency’s right lobe of the liver >75th percentile (RC = 0.361, 95% CI [0.169, 0.552] P<0.001). Weight gain in the first year of life was inversely correlated with (a) mean IMT of left carotid (RC = −0.046, 95% CI [−0.086, −0.006] P<0.05; (b) frequency IMT of left carotid >75th percentile (RC = −0.253, 95% CI [−0.487, −0.018] P<0.05); (c) mean IMT (RC = −0.038, 95% CI [0.073, −0.002] P<0.05); (d) the frequency of the mean IMT >75th percentile (RC = −0.241, 95% CI [−0.442, −0.041] P<0.05). Conclusions. Adults birthweight <2,500 g and >3,500 g and with insufficient weight gain in the first year of life have showed different metabolic phenotypes, but all of them were related to subclinical atherosclerosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]