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Background and Purpose. Persistent deficits in gait speed and spatiotemporal symmetry are prevalent following stroke and can limit the achievement of community mobility goals. Rehabilitation can improve gait speed, but has shown limited ability to improve spatiotemporal symmetry. The incorporation of combined visual and proprioceptive feedback regarding spatiotemporal symmetry has the potential to be effective at improving gait. Case Description. A 60-year-old man (18 months poststroke) and a 53-year-old woman (21 months poststroke) each participated in gait training to improve gait speed and spatiotemporal symmetry. Each patient performed 18 sessions (6 weeks) of combined treadmill-based gait training followed by overground practice. To assist with relearning spatiotemporal symmetry, treadmill-based training for both patients was augmented with continuous, real-time visual and proprioceptive feedback from an immersive virtual environment and a dual belt treadmill, respectively. Outcomes. Both patients improved gait speed (patient 1:0.35 m/s improvement; patient 2:0.26 m/s improvement) and spatiotemporal symmetry. Patient 1, who trained with step-length symmetry feedback, improved his step-length symmetry ratio, but not his stance-time symmetry ratio. Patient 2, who trained with stance-time symmetry feedback, improved her stance-time symmetry ratio. She had no steplength asymmetry before training. Discussion. Both patients made improvements in gait speed and spatiotemporal symmetry that exceeded those reported in the literature. Further work is needed to ascertain the role of combined visual and proprioceptive feedback for improving gait speed and spatiotemporal symmetry after chronic stroke., Following stroke, intensive rehabilitation is used to reduce deficits in gait speed, efficiency, and symmetry. Restoring symmetric gait is important to improve gait efficiency and gait speed (1,2) and to [...]

When collaborating, individuals rely on situation awareness (the gathering, incorporation and utilization of environmental information) to help them combine their unique knowledge and skills and achieve their goals. When collaborating across distances, situation awareness is mediated by technology. There are few guidelines to help system analysts design systems or applications that support the creation and maintenance of situation awareness for teams or groups. We propose a framework to guide design decisions to enhance computer-mediated situation awareness during scientific research collaboration. The foundation for this framework is previous research in situation awareness and virtual reality, combined with our analysis of interviews with and observations of collaborating scientists. The framework suggests that situation awareness is comprised of contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information. Research in virtual reality systems suggests control, sensory, distraction and realism attributes of technology contribute to a sense of presence [Presence 7 (1998) 225]. We suggest that consideration of these attributes with respect to contextual, task and process, and socio-emotional information provides insights to guide design decisions. We used the framework when designing a scientific collaboratory system. Results from a controlled experimental evaluation of the collaboratory system help illustrate the framework's utility. Keywords: Situation awareness; Collaboration; Collaboratory; Systems design

The potential of collaboratories are analyzed, allowing individuals who do not have specialized state-of-the-art scientific instruments locally to access scientific instruments remotely and conduct scientific experiments. A variety of quantitative and qualitative evaluation data were collected, including task performance measures to compare the quality of scientific work produced in the two collaboration conditions.

Not long ago, workstation users who needed programmable graphics, image processing, floatingpoint calculations, and other computation-intensive, display-dependent features had to design or buy multiple graphics subsytems. Photographic quality, computer-generated images, […]