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As older people become frail, they tend to fall more easily. Moreover, women have a higher rate of falls than men. However, effective strategies to avoid elderly women falling are lacking. The Timed Up and Go test is a well-known indicator of falling tendency. This study clarifies the motor elements related to the Timed Up and Go test according to the degree of weakness in older outpatients to specify exercise intervention to improve weakness and prevent falls. Participants were 145 female outpatients who visited the Locomo-Frail outpatient clinic, classified into three groups (robust, prefrail, and frail, according to the definition of the Japanese Cardiovascular Health Study. Vertical ground reaction force parameters were measured for all participants when they stood up from a chair, walking speed, and the Timed Up and Go test. Results showed that walking speed is related to the Timed Up and Go test in the robust group; balance ability is related to the Timed Up and Go test in the prefrail group; and instantaneous force is related to the Timed Up and Go test in the frail group. These results suggest that weakness can be improved by performing exercise interventions of balance and instantaneous force elements in the prefrail and frail groups, respectively.

This paper is discussing the intuitive interaction with robotic systems and the conceptualisation connected with known organisational problems. In particular, the focus will be on the manufacturing industry with respect to its social dimension. One of the aims is to identify relevant research questions about the possibility of development of safer robot systems in closer human-machine intuitive interaction systems at the manufacturing shop-floor level. We try to contribute to minimize the cognitive and perceptual workload for robot operators in complex working systems. In particular that will be highly relevant when more different robots with different roles and produced by different companies or designers are to be used in the manufacturing industry to a larger extent. The social sciences approach to such technology assessment is of high relevance to understand the dimensions of the intuitive interaction concept.

Numerical applications frequently contain nested loops that process large arrays of data. The execution of these loop structures often produces memory reference patterns that utilize data caches poorly. Indeed, poor reuse of the data, large working set sizes, and frequent non-unit stride accesses all combine to cause many cache misses. To improve cache performance, data copying has been proposed. However, this technique has high overhead. In this paper, instead, we propose a combined hardware and software technique called data relocation and prefetching which eliminates much of the overhead of data copying through the use of special hardware. Furthermore, by relocating the data while performing software prefetch- ing, the overhead of copying the data can be reduced further. This technique performs better than prefetching alone because it reduces cache misses through relocation, and it reduces overhead by prefetching multiple elements at once. The hardware is designed to overlap relocation and prefetching with normal execution, and to highly utilize the available bus bandwidth. Simulation results show that this technique greatly reduces data cache miss rates. As a result, large applications including PERFECT and SPEC benchmarks achieve up to 2.5 times speedup. The hardware support required by this technique has been greatly refined over that presented in an earlier paper. (AN)