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Background: Little is known about the effectiveness of instructors when presenting content in videos alone. In recent years, researchers have increasingly begun to explore the effects of instructors' social cues (e.g., eye gaze, body orientation, etc.) on learning. However, previous studies exploring the effects of eye gaze have confounded the role of body orientation, while studies exploring body orientation have confounded the role of eye gaze. Objectives: To explore the role of direct gaze and body orientation in learning with instructional videos, absent an instructional screen, in a less confounded manner. Methods: A total of 63 subjects were presented select concepts regarding schizophrenia. Eye‐tracking technology combined with current theories of parasocial interaction and social agency was used to explore different social cues that affect learning performance. Students were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: frontal body + direct gaze group (FD group), frontal body + no direct gaze group (FND group), and lateral body + no direct gaze group (LND group). Result and Conclusions: Direct gaze facilitated students' immediate retention and transfer scores, reduced learners' extraneous cognitive load, and guided students' attention to the instructor. However, counter to our expectations, parasocial interaction did not affect social cues. Implications: In both online and offline classes, instruction is expected to be enhanced by focusing on the camera to the extent possible, particularly when instructional screens are absent. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: In recent years, how instructors' social cues (eye gaze, body orientation, gestures, etc.) can improve video learning has aroused widespread concern.Instructors' eye gaze and body orientation can increase society and improve learning in the online learning environment.The empirical research confounds the role of eye gaze and body orientation on video learning when only the instructors are present. What this paper adds: When only the instructor is present in the video, instructor's direct gaze can foster learner's learning outcome in the instructional video.When only the instructor is present in the video, instructor's direct gaze can draw the learner's attention to the instructor's face.When only the instructor is present in the video, instructor's direct gaze can reduce learner's extraneous cognitive load. Implications for practice and/or policy: In online teaching, educators should consider looking at the camera as much as possible, especially when there are no instructional screens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text describes the method of script drama work in therapy, counselling and supervision. The method combines TA concepts such as decontamination, work on impasses, deconfusion and the body-based method of Al Pesso and Diane Boyden Pesso. It shows how microtracking and special constellations are used to understand and appreciate the client's inner system and supplement it with new, corrective experiences. The integrating adult is addressed and strengthened as a central instance on the client's side. Case studies are used to demonstrate how beliefs and assumptions can become evident in a body-oriented way in the here and now and how their inhibiting effects are neutralized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proprioception, a vital physiological process driven by neural activity, is enhanced by activating proprioceptors in muscles, tendons, joints, ligaments, and internal organ feedback, collectively shaping the body's internal environment. Within the comprehensive framework of physical exercises for 10-year-old children, the psycho-neuro-motor aspect plays a pivotal role in regulating and providing feedback in response to stimuli from both external and internal bodily environments. This study aimed to assess the efficacy of specific testing methods for evaluating proprioceptive aspects related to body orientation, balance, and coordination. Materials and Methods: Twelve subjects (6 boys and 6 girls), aged 10 years and enrolled in the 4th grade at a public primary school, underwent testing utilizing two protocols: the hexagon and circle tests. Objective measurements were obtained using the Optojump Next-test equipment from MICROGATE. The resulting data were analyzed using statistical-mathematical methods, including descriptive analysis and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for normality assessment. The data were normally distributed (p > 0.05) in the hexagon and circle tests. Additionally, the independent samples t-test was conducted for comparison, revealing no statistically significant differences between the hexagon and circle tests [on the x-axis: t(22) = .173; p > 0.05; on the y-axis: t(22) = .375; p > 0.05; and for the average landing distance: t(22) = .382; p > 0.05]. Results: Despite observable differences in execution difficulty, the obtained results did not reveal a significant disparity between the hexagon and circle tests in assessing proprioceptive capabilities. Conclusions: Increasing task complexity during proprioceptive testing of body orientation, balance, and coordination did not yield divergent results when employing the same testing equipment. Therefore, future research endeavors should prioritize identifying testing modalities that offer significantly distinct outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a system that estimates people’s body and head orientations using low-resolution point cloud data from two LiDAR sensors. Our models make accurate estimations in real-world conversation settings where subjects move naturally with varying head and body poses, while seated around a table. The body orientation estimation model uses ellipse fitting while the head orientation estimation model combines geometric feature extraction with an ensemble of neural network regressors. Our models achieve a mean absolute estimation error of 5.2 degrees for body orientation and 13.7 degrees for head orientation. Compared to other body/head orientation estimation systems that use RGB cameras, our proposed system uses LiDAR sensors to preserve user privacy, while achieving comparable accuracy. Unlike other body/head orientation estimation systems, our sensors do not require a specified close-range placement in front of the subject, enabling estimation from a surveillance viewpoint which produces low-resolution data. This work is the first to attempt head orientation estimation using point clouds in a low-resolution surveillance setting. We compare our model to two state-of-the-art head orientation estimation models that are designed for high-resolution point clouds, which yield higher estimation errors on our low-resolution dataset. We also present an application of head orientation estimation by quantifying behavioral differences between neurotypical and autistic individuals in triadic (three-way) conversations. Significance tests show that autistic individuals display significantly different behavior compared to neurotypical individuals in distributing attention between conversational parties, suggesting that the approach could be a component of a behavioral analysis or coaching system.

Domestic chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) have been widely used as a model to study the motion cues that allow visually naïve organisms to detect animate agents shortly after hatching/birth. Our previous work has shown that chicks prefer to approach agents whose main body axis and motion direction are aligned (a feature typical of creatures whose motion is constrained by a bilaterally symmetric body plan). However, it has never been investigated whether chicks are also sensitive to the fact that an agent maintains a stable front–back body orientation in motion (i.e. consistency in which end is leading and which trailing). This is another feature typical of bilateria, which is also associated with the detection of animate agents in humans. The aim of the present study was to fill this gap. Contrary to our initial expectations, after testing 300 chicks across 3 experimental conditions, we found a recurrent preference for the agent which did not maintain a stable front–back body orientation. Since this preference was limited to female chicks, the results are discussed also in relation to sex differences in the social behaviour of this model. Overall, we show for the first time that chicks can discriminate agents based on the stability of their front–back orientation. The unexpected direction of the effect could reflect a preference for agents' whose behaviour is less predictable. Chicks may prefer agents with greater behavioural variability, a trait which has been associated with animate agents, or have a tendency to explore agents performing "odd behaviours". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of vestibular, visual and body cues is a fundamental process in the perception of self-motion and is commonly experienced in an upright posture. However, when the body is tilted in an off-vertical orientation these signals are no longer aligned relative to the influence of gravity. In this study, the perceived timing of visual motion was examined in the presence of sensory conflict introduced by manipulating the orientation of the body, generating a mismatch between body and vestibular cues due to gravity and creating an ambiguous vestibular signal of either head tilt or translation. In a series of temporal-order judgment tasks, participants reported the perceived onset of a visual scene simulating rotation around the yaw axis presented in virtual reality with a paired auditory tone while in an upright, supine and side-recumbent body position. The results revealed that the perceived onset of visual motion was further delayed from zero (i.e., true simultaneity between visual onset and a reference auditory tone) by approximately an additional 30 ms when viewed in a supine or side-recumbent orientation compared to an upright posture. There were also no significant differences in the timing estimates of the visual motion between all the non-upright orientations. This indicates that the perceived timing of visual motion is negatively impacted by the presence of conflict in the vestibular and body signals due to the direction of gravity and body orientation, even when the mismatch is not in the direct plane of the axis of rotation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Body Orientation Estimation (BOE) is important for a wide array of applications, including robotics, surveillance and consumer analysis. Although multi-sensor approaches are effective, they are not a viable option for in the wild scenarios; the usual approach in such cases is to use single camera images, with imprecise results. Some applications that deal with people benefit from obtaining 2D human skeletons for gesture recognition, and these skeletons bring valuable information about the person's pose. It is proposed to build a 2D skeleton via OpenPose and using its data as training data on XGBoost to detect BOE. To evaluate predictions considering real situations based on a single camera, the TUD Multiview Pedestrian dataset is used and extended considering that a single person is originally considered in images where more people were often identified. It is compared the proposed approach against various state-of-the-art methods and our results indicate better performance. Finally, it is proved that our method is viable for BOE in real-time scenarios by presenting case studies on simulated scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gait analysis identifies the posture during movement in order to provide the correct actions for a normal gait. A person’s gait may differ from others and can be recognized by specific patterns. Healthy individuals exhibit normal gait patterns, while lower limb amputees exhibit abnormal gait patterns. To better understand the pitfalls of gait, it is imperative to develop systems capable of capturing the gait patterns of healthy individuals. In this research, spatio-temporal parameters were computed using the concepts of static and dynamic equilibrium to analyze the gait cycle. A relationship was also developed among static equilibrium, dynamic equilibrium, speed, and body states. A sensing unit was installed on the designed metal-based leg mounting assembly on the lateral side of the leg. An algorithm was proposed based on two variables: the position of the leg in space and the angle of the knee joint measured by using an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor and a rotary encoder. It was acceptable to satisfy the static conditions when the body was in a fixed orientation, whether lying down or standing. While walking and running, the orientation was determined by the position and knee angle variables, which fulfill the dynamic condition. High speed reveals a rapid change in orientation, while slow speed reveals a slow change in orientation. The proposed encoder-based feedback system successfully determined the flexion at 47°, extension at 153°, and all seven gait cycle phases were recognized within this range of motion. Computed spatio-temporal parameters may help individuals avoid slipping or falling.

Body orientation of football players has proven to be an informative resource related to successful penalty kicks. OpenPose is one of the most popular open-source pose estimation technologies. This study aims: (i) to verify whether OpenPose can detect relevant body orientation angles from video data of penalty kicks in elite football and (ii) to investigate the relationship between these body angles and observable behaviors analyzed via an observational system for penalty kick analysis in football (OSPAF) with the penalty taker and goalkeeper strategy. A total of 34 penalty videos, with standardized viewing angle, from the main European leagues (2017–2020) were analyzed. Relevant body orientation variables were selected for penalty kicks analysis and were extracted from video data through OpenPose technique. The OSPAF, previously validated by experts, was used. The mean confidence score of OpenPose measures was 0.80 ± 0.14. OpenPose Retest reliability values was 0.976 ± 0.03. Logistic regressions were performed to investigate the relationship between OpenPose investigated variables (penalty taker: shoulder, hips, and nonkicking foot orientation; goalkeeper: right and left foot, anticipation), observable behaviors (OSPAF variables), and the strategy (penalty taker: goalkeeper dependent or independent; goalkeeper: shooter dependent or independent) in penalty kicks. The selected body orientation angle (goalkeeper anticipation) measured through OpenPose correlated significantly with the goalkeeper strategy. The prediction model of the goalkeeper's strategy had its accuracy increased to 97% when the variable goalkeeper anticipation was included [χ(35)2 = 49.648, p < 0.001]. Lower degrees of goalkeeper anticipation, the goalkeeper tactical action (awaiting), and run up speed (slow) were associated with a kicker-dependent strategy. Regarding the penalty taker, the selected body angles measured through OpenPose did not associate significantly with the shooter strategy. Body orientation analysis by using OpenPose has shown sufficient reliability and provides practical applications for analyzing the strategies adopted by goalkeepers in penalty kicks in elite football.

A bistable image admits two possible interpretations, so that the observer can recognize the two percepts, but never at the same time. The alternations between percepts are called "perceptual reversals". When the observer's position is different from the upright position, the ability to make perceptual alternations may be impaired. Besides, the recognition of the percepts of a bistable image can be a complex reaction time visual task, if it involves recognizing two different conceptual units, added to the fact of having to make a subsequent report. A visual task was performed by 88 people in order to establish whether the perception of Boring's bistable image My girlfriend or my mother-in-law is associated with areas that condition its interpretation. It was assumed that decoding the image and reporting the perceived percept implied a complex reaction time. The task itself was done in front of a fixed 120 Hz eye-tracker, in two opposite body positions. Analyses were made reviewing the association of the percepts with bottom-up modulation areas of the image, and considering ocular fixations made 200 and 250 milliseconds before the time of the report. The records of these fixations were obtained so as to establish which of the two reaction times (200 ms or 250 ms) was involved in the bottom-up modulation process from the moment of ocular fixation to the reports given by the participants. It was concluded that perceptual reversals decrease significantly when head idiotropic axis points in the gravity vector direction, in comparison to the upright position. Likewise, associations between visual percepts and bottom-up modulating areas of the image were found when analyses were done by considering ocular fixations made 250 ms before the moment of the report. Interpreting Boring's bistable image implies a complex visual task in accordance with the results obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied the characteristics of the marking behavior of Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus) at rub trees. We recorded the tree-marking (tree-rubbing and bark-scratching) and associated (stomping) behaviors in Japan between 2010 and 2015 using automatic cameras and compared the results with those from previous studies on other bear species. We recorded 22 visits to trees by ≥6 different individuals. During these visits, there were no differences in the frequency or duration between the 3 body orientations of back rubbing, front rubbing, and body-side rubbing, which differs from the findings for other bear species. However, bipedal standing was the most common posture, as observed in other species. We also analyzed the order of tree-marking actions. For a better understanding of the Asiatic black bear's marking behavior, further examples of marking behavior and anatomical studies of secretory glands are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In supermarkets or grocery, a shopping cart is a necessary tool for shopping. In this paper, we have developed an intelligent shopping support robot that can carry a shopping cart while following its owners and provide the shopping support by observing the customer’s head orientation, body orientation and recognizing different shopping behaviors. Recognizing shopping behavior or the intensity of such action is important for understanding the best way to support the customer without disturbing him or her. This system also liberates elderly and disabled people from the burden of pushing shopping carts, because our proposed shopping cart is essentially a type of autonomous mobile robots that recognizes its owner and following him or her. The proposed system discretizes the head and body orientation of customer into 8 directions to estimate whether the customer is looking or turning towards a merchandise shelf. From the robot’s video stream, a DNN-based human pose estimator called OpenPose is used to extract the skeleton of 18 joints for each detected body. Using this extracted body joints information, we built a dataset and developed a novel Gated Recurrent Neural Network (GRU) topology to classify different actions that are typically performed in front of shelves: reach to shelf, retract from shelf, hand in shelf, inspect product, inspect shelf. Our GRU network model takes series of 32 frames skeleton data then gives the prediction. Using cross-validation tests, our model achieves an overall accuracy of 82%, which is a significant result. Finally, from the customer’s head orientation, body orientation and shopping behavior recognition we develop a complete system for our shopping support robot.

Purpose: To compare mechanical properties of overground sprint running in elite rugby union and rugby league athletes. Methods: Thirty elite rugby code (15 rugby union and 15 rugby league) athletes participated in this cross-sectional analysis. Radar was used to measure maximal overground sprint performance over 20 or 30 m (forwards and backs, respectively). In addition to time at 2, 5, 10, 20, and 30 m, velocity-time signals were analyzed to derive external horizontal force--velocity relationships with a recently validated method. From this relationship, the maximal theoretical velocity, external relative and absolute horizontal force, horizontal power, and optimal horizontal force for peak power production were determined. Results: While differences in maximal velocity were unclear between codes, rugby union backs produced moderately faster split times, with the most substantial differences occurring at 2 and 5 m (ES 0.95 and 0.86, respectively). In addition, rugby union backs produced moderately larger relative horizontal force, optimal force, and peak power capabilities than rugby league backs (ES 0.73-0.77). Rugby union forwards had a higher absolute force (ES 0.77) despite having ~12% more body weight than rugby league forwards. Conclusions: In this elite sample, rugby union athletes typically displayed greater short-distance sprint performance, which may be linked to an ability to generate high levels of horizontal force and power. The acceleration characteristics presented in this study could be a result of the individual movement and positional demands of each code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• After stroke, body orientation improved with time in most individuals. • However, half of individuals with lateropulsion were still not upright at 3 months. • Lateropulsion attenuation was not slower in individuals with severe forms. • Balance and gait recovery was possible without improvement of body orientation. • Lateropulsion attenuation enhanced balance and gait recovery during the same period. Lateropulsion is a deficit in body orientation with respect to gravity, frequent after stroke. Although it is a primary factor affecting mobility, the impact of its attenuation on balance and gait recovery has never been investigated. Moreover, most studies on the lateropulsion time-course focus on severe forms suspected to have a poor recovery, which is not proven. To investigate lateropulsion attenuation and test 2 hypotheses: 1) lateropulsion attenuation greatly contributes to balance and gait recovery and 2) severe forms of lateropulsion recover slower than moderate forms. This longitudinal study involved individuals included in the Determinants of Balance Recovery After Stroke (DOBRAS) cohort, after a first-ever hemispheric stroke, with data collected on day 30 (D30), D60 and D90 post-stroke. Body orientation with respect to gravity was assessed using the Scale for Contraversive Pushing (both scores and severity grouping), in parallel with balance (Postural Assessment Scale for Stroke) and gait (modified Fugl-Meyer Gait Assessment). Among the 106 eligible individuals (mean age 66.5 [SD 9.7] years), on D30, 43 (41%) were considered upright and 63 (59%) showed lateropulsion: 30 (28%) moderate and 33 (31%) severe. Most individuals with lateropulsion (73%) improved their body orientation, progressing from severe to moderate lateropulsion, or becoming upright. However, half were still not upright on D90. The improvement in body orientation had a large impact on mobility, especially in individuals with severe lateropulsion, in whom it explained about 50% of balance and gait recovery between D30 and D60, then 20% (D60-D90). For moderate lateropulsion, its attenuation explained about 20% of balance and gait recovery until D90. Lateropulsion attenuation was not slower in individuals with severe forms. Lateropulsion attenuation enhances balance and gait recovery in individuals after stroke suggesting that specific rehabilitation of body orientation with respect to gravity might help to recover mobility. NCT03203109 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Spontaneous postural sway during quiet standing has been considered a simple output error of postural control. However, as postural sway and inherent body orientation evoke compensatory activity of the plantar flexors, they might contribute to blood circulation under gravitational stress via the muscle pump. Hence, the present study employed an external support device to attenuate the plantar flexor activity in supported standing (SS), to experimentally identify its physiological impact on blood circulation. Methods: Eight healthy young subjects performed two 5-min quiet standing trials (i.e., normal standing (NS) and SS), and the beat-to-beat interval (RRI) and blood pressure (BP) were compared between trials. We confirmed that postural sway and corresponding plantar flexor activity, quantified by the anteroposterior displacement of the foot center of pressure and lower back position with respect to the wall, and by the amplitude of electromyography and mechanomyography, respectively, were attenuated in SS, while mean body orientation angle and relative position of the BP sensor were comparable to NS. Results: The 5-min averages of diastolic BP and mean arterial pressure during SS were significantly higher than during NS, while RRI and systolic BP did not change. These could be interpreted as an increase in peripheral vascular resistance; meanwhile, in NS, this effect was replaced by the muscle pump of the plantar flexors. Conclusion: The muscle contractions related to spontaneous postural sway and body orientation produce substantial physiological impact on blood circulation during quiet standing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Multisensory audiovisual semantic congruency is the process by which visual information is perceived as integrated to auditory stimuli, because both coincide in terms of simultaneity and semantic correspondence. This study was aimed at establishing whether visual percepts, which semantically correspond to auditory stimuli, are associated with ocular fixations in modulating bottom-up areas while keeping a body posture alignment between the up-direction and the idiotropic axes, as well as in another orientation corresponding to a vectorial opposition between the up-direction and the head idiotropic axis. Method: Two groups (one for each position) were selected from a sample of 88 people. A bistable image was presented on a screen of a fixed 120 Hz eye-tracker device, providing background auditory stimuli so as to establish semantic congruencies and their relations to ocular fixations. Results: It was found that audiovisual semantic congruency is associated with fixations when idiotropic vectors are aligned with the up direction. Fixations manifested in bottom-up modulating areas are not associated with multisensory audiovisual semantic congruency when the head idiotropic vector is parallel with the gravity vector. Eye fixations decrease significantly if the head idiotropic axis is aligned with the gravity vector. Conclusion: It is concluded that body position can affect visual perceptual processes involved in the occurrence of semantic congruency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Body orientation of gesture entails social‐communicative intention, and may thus influence how gestures are perceived and comprehended together with auditory speech during face‐to‐face communication. To date, despite the emergence of neuroscientific literature on the role of body orientation on hand action perception, limited studies have directly investigated the role of body orientation in the interaction between gesture and language. To address this research question, we carried out an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment presenting to participants (n = 21) videos of frontal and lateral communicative hand gestures of 5 s (e.g., raising a hand), followed by visually presented sentences that are either congruent or incongruent with the gesture (e.g., "the mountain is high/low..."). Participants underwent a semantic probe task, judging whether a target word is related or unrelated to the gesture‐sentence event. EEG results suggest that, during the perception phase of handgestures, while both frontal and lateral gestures elicited a power decrease in both the alpha (8–12 Hz) and the beta (16–24 Hz) bands, lateral versus frontal gestures elicited reduced power decrease in the beta band, source‐located to the medial prefrontal cortex. For sentence comprehension, at the critical word whose meaning is congruent/incongruent with the gesture prime, frontal gestures elicited an N400 effect for gesture‐sentence incongruency. More importantly, this incongruency effect was significantly reduced for lateral gestures. These findings suggest that body orientation plays an important role in gesture perception, and that its inferred social‐communicative intention may influence gesture‐language interaction at semantic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of closed-loop interaction in in vitro and in vivo electrophysiology has been successfully implemented in the dynamic clamp concept strongly impacting the research of membrane and synaptic properties of neurons. In this paper we show that this concept can be easily generalized to build other kinds of closed-loop protocols beyond (or in addition to) electrical stimulation and recording in neurophysiology and behavioral studies for neuroethology. In particular, we illustrate three different examples of goal-driven real-time closed-loop interactions with drug microinjectors, mechanical devices and video event driven stimulation. Modern activity-dependent stimulation protocols can be used to reveal dynamics (otherwise hidden under traditional stimulation techniques), achieve control of natural and pathological states, induce learning, bridge between disparate levels of analysis and for a further automation of experiments. We argue that closed-loop interaction calls for novel real time analysis, prediction and control tools and a new perspective for designing stimulus-response experiments, which can have a large impact in neuroscience research.

The feeling of being addressed is the first step in a complex processing stream enabling successful social communication. Social impairments are a relevant characteristic of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). Here, we investigated a mechanism which—if impaired—might contribute to withdrawal or isolation in MDD, namely, the neural processing of social cues such as body orientation and gesture. During funtional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquisition, 33 patients with MDD and 43 healthy control subjects watched video clips of a speaking actor: one version with a gesture accompanying the speech and one without gesture. Videos were filmed simultaneously from two different viewpoints: one with the actor facing the viewer head‐on (frontal) and one side‐view (lateral). After every clip, the participants were instructed to evaluate whether they felt addressed or not. Despite overall comparable addressment ratings and a large overlap in activation patterns in MDD and healthy subjects for gesture processing, the anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral superior/middle frontal cortex, and right angular gyrus were more strongly activated in patients than in healthy subjects for the frontal conditions. Our analyses revealed that patients showed specifically higher activation than healthy subjects for the frontal condition without gesture in regions including the posterior cingulate cortex, left prefrontal cortex, and the left hippocampus. We conclude that MDD patients can recognize and interpret social cues such as gesture or body orientation; however, they seem to require more neural resources. This additional effort might affect successful communication and contribute to social isolation in MDD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horizontal force-velocity (F-V) profiling is a strategy to assess athletes' individual performance capabilities during sprinting. This study investigated the acute changes in F-V profiles during sprinting of fourteen collegiate male sprinters with a mean 100-m sprint time of 11.40 ± 0.39 s, from a split-stance starting position. The subjects sprinted 30-m with, and without, wearable resistance (WR) equivalent to 2% body mass, attached to their forearms. Sprinting time at 5, 10, 20, and 30-m was assessed using laser technology. External horizontal F-V relationships were calculated via velocity-time signals. Maximal theoretical velocity (V0), theoretical relative and absolute horizontal force (F0), and horizontal power (Pmax) were determined from the F-V relationship. Paired t-tests were used to determine statistical differences (p ≤ 0.05) in variables across conditions with Cohen's d as effect sizes (ES) calculated to assess practical changes. Sprint times at 10-m and beyond were significantly increased (1.9–3.3%, p 0.01–0.03, ES 0.46–0.60) with WR compared to unloaded sprinting. The only significant change in F-V with the WR condition was found in relative Pmaxsystem (−6.1%, p 0.01, ES 0.66). A small decrease was reported in V0 (−1.0%, p 0.11, ES 0.27), with small to medium ES decreases reported in F0 (−4.8% to −6.1%, p 0.07–0.21, ES 0.25-0.51) and Pmax (−4.3% to −4.6%, p 0.06–0.08, ES 0.32–0.45). The greater changes to F0 and Pmax suggest that forearm WR may be a possible training tool for athletes who wish to focus on force and power adaptation during sprint acceleration from a standing start. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In supermarkets or grocery, a shopping cart is a necessary tool for shopping. In this paper, we have developed an intelligent shopping support robot that can carry a shopping cart while following its owners and provide the shopping support by observing the customer's head orientation, body orientation and recognizing different shopping behaviors. Recognizing shopping behavior or the intensity of such action is important for understanding the best way to support the customer without disturbing him or her. This system also liberates elderly and disabled people from the burden of pushing shopping carts, because our proposed shopping cart is essentially a type of autonomous mobile robots that recognizes its owner and following him or her. The proposed system discretizes the head and body orientation of customer into 8 directions to estimate whether the customer is looking or turning towards a merchandise shelf. From the robot's video stream, a DNN-based human pose estimator called OpenPose is used to extract the skeleton of 18 joints for each detected body. Using this extracted body joints information, we built a dataset and developed a novel Gated Recurrent Neural Network (GRU) topology to classify different actions that are typically performed in front of shelves: reach to shelf, retract from shelf, hand in shelf, inspect product, inspect shelf. Our GRU network model takes series of 32 frames skeleton data then gives the prediction. Using cross-validation tests, our model achieves an overall accuracy of 82%, which is a significant result. Finally, from the customer's head orientation, body orientation and shopping behavior recognition we develop a complete system for our shopping support robot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most human navigation studies in MRI rely on virtual navigation. However, the necessary supine position in MRI makes it fundamentally different from daily ecological navigation. Nonetheless, until now, no study has assessed whether differences in physical body orientation (BO) affect participants' experienced BO during virtual navigation. Here, combining an immersive virtual reality navigation task with subjective BO measures and implicit behavioral measures, we demonstrate that physical BO (either standing or supine) modulates experienced BO. Also, we show that standing upright BO is preferred during spatial navigation: participants were more likely to experience a standing BO and were better at spatial navigation when standing upright. Importantly, we report that showing a supine virtual agent reduces the conflict between the preferred BO and physical supine BO. Our study provides critical, but missing, information regarding experienced BO during virtual navigation, which should be considered cautiously when designing navigation studies, especially in MRI., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests., (Copyright © 2023 Moon et al.)

Image based human behavior and activity understanding has been a hot topic in the field of computer vision and multimedia. As an important part, skeleton estimation, which is also called pose estimation, has attracted lots of interests. For pose estimation, most of the deep learning approaches mainly focus on the joint feature. However, the joint feature is not sufficient, especially when the image includes multi-person and the pose is occluded or not fully visible. This paper proposes a novel multi-task framework for the multi-person pose estimation. The proposed framework is developed based on Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (R-CNN) and extended to integrate the joint feature, body boundary, body orientation and occlusion condition together. In order to further improve the performance of the multi-person pose estimation, this paper proposes to organize the different information in serial multi-task models instead of the widely used parallel multi-task network. The proposed models are trained on the public dataset Common Objects in Context (COCO), which is further augmented by ground truths of body orientation and mutual-occlusion mask. Experiments demonstrate the performance of the proposed method for multi-person pose estimation and body orientation estimation. The proposed method can detect 84.6% of the Percentage of Correct Keypoints (PCK) and has an 83.7% Correct Detection Rate (CDR). Comparisons further illustrate the proposed model can reduce the over-detection compared with other methods.

Objective . Neonatal jaundice is a common condition in the early stages of newborns, and phototherapy is a fast, safe and effective method that is used to treat it. However, recent studies have shown that phototherapy may elicit side effects in infants, such as hypothermia, hyperthermia and dehydration. To improve the quality of phototherapy and the prognosis of patients, the changes in neonatal physiological parameters during phototherapy should be monitored to give better feedback to pediatricians or the phototherapy system. However, the current standard of clinical care during neonatal phototherapy with hard-wired devices limits this realization. Approach . Here, we developed a prototype of a neonatal wearable device, which can wirelessly potentially monitor the jaundice value, transepidermal water loss, skin wettedness factor and body orientation during phototherapy, and conducted prototype validation experiments. We also set up user-friendly interfaces and an analysis system on custom software, all designed to make the future addition of data interfaces for treatment feedback functions easier. Main results . The preliminary in vitro experiment demonstrated the effectiveness of simultaneous monitoring of the required physiological parameters. And further suggestions and specific operations are discussed in terms of optimization of the treatment of neonatal jaundice. Significance . It is believed that the established system has the potential to provide a basis for future phototherapy nursing guidelines and physiological monitoring standards., (© 2023 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.)

The analysis of customer pose is one of the most important topics for marketing. Using the customer pose information, the retailers can evaluate the customer interest level to the merchandise. However, the pose estimation is not easy because of the problems of occlusion and left-right similarity. To address these two problems, we propose an Integral Pose Network (IntePoseNet) which incorporates the body orientation and visibility mask. Firstly, benefiting from the simple gaits in retail store, the body orientation can give the global information of pose configuration. For example, if a person is facing to right, the body orientation indicates the occlusion of his or her left body. Similarly, if a person is facing to the camera, his or her right shoulder is probably at the left side of image. The body orientation is fused with local joint connections by a set of novel Orientational Message Passing (OMP) layers in Deep Neural Network. Secondly, the visibility mask models the occlusion state of each joint. It is tightly related to the body orientation because the body orientation is the main reason of self-occlusion. In addition, occluding object (e.g. shopping basket in retail store environment) detection can also give the clues of visibility mask prediction. Furthermore, the system models the temporal consistency by introducing the optical flow and Bi-directional Recurrent Neural Network. Therefore, the global body orientation, local joint connections, customer motion, occluding objects and temporal consistency are integrally considered in our system. At last, we conduct a series of comparison experiments to show the effectiveness of our system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of customer pose draws more and more attention of retailers and researchers, because this information can reveal the customer habits and the customer interest level to the merchandise. In the retail store environment, customers’ poses are highly related to their body orientations. For example, when a customer is picking an item from merchandise shelf, he or she must face to the shelf. On the other hand, if the customer body orientation is parallel to the shelf, this customer is probably just walking through. Considering this fact, we propose a customer pose estimation system using orientational spatio-temporal deep neural network from surveillance camera. This system first generates the initial joint heatmaps using a fully convolutional network. Based on these heatmaps, we propose a set of novel orientational message-passing layers to fine-tune joint heatmaps by introducing the body orientation information into the conventional message-passing layers. In addition, we apply a bi-directional recurrent neural network on top of the system to improve the estimation accuracy by considering both forward and backward image sequences. Therefore, in this system, the global body orientation, local joint connections, and temporal pose continuity are integrally considered. At last, we conduct a series of comparison experiments to show the effectiveness of our system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orientation of human body is an important feature that can be used for behavioral analysis in surveillance systems. This cue contains useful information such as the direction of movement or attention. Difficulties such as low quality images, cluttered background and partial occlusion harden orientation estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for determining body orientation using the ensemble of logistic regression classifiers.The logistic regression is a discriminative model that is very efficient in time and space complexities. In addition to these desirable properties, we show that this classifier provides a good classification performance in our problem. These classifiers are trained using Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptors which are extracted from four regions in the bounding box of the subjects. Two types of regions are considered in our method: static and dynamic regions. Static regions include: the whole body, upper half and the lower half of the body. Dynamic region includes the region of head and shoulder, which is located dynamically in various images and should be localized for each instance. To enhance the output of each classifier, we propose a weighting scheme based on the inherent characteristics of the orientation estimation problem and finally combine these outputs in an ensemble method to improve the accuracy. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method in accuracy and time complexity as compared to the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]