Individuals spend most of their time indoors, and therefore indoor environments are important aspects of one’s life. Creating healthful indoor environments should be a priority for building ...designers, and evidence-based design decisions should be used to ensure the built environment provides healthful benefits to occupants. This review was conducted to examine the body of research studying wood use and human stress to determine the potential fit for wood in the restorative environmental design paradigm. Previous studies on psychophysiological responses to wood are reviewed, as are current methods for assessing stress in experimental settings. To date, studies examining the psychophysiological effects of wood use in interiors have revealed reduced autonomic stress responses when compared to rooms without and with less wood. Therefore, by increasing wood use in design paradigms seeking to bring the positive health benefits of nature into the built environment, like restorative environmental design, building designers may improve the well-being of building occupants. This review reveals further studies are needed to better understand the psychophysiological responses to wood, and suggests specific aspects of wood such as colour, quantity, and grain pattern should be examined and how stress and stress recovery should be analysed.
Sleep, sedentary behaviour (SB), and physical activity are among key behavioural determinants of health. There is a need to evaluate questionnaires that capture movement behaviours across the full ...24-h day. The aim of this study was to examine the measurement properties of the Daily Activity Behaviours Questionnaire (DABQ), a novel questionnaire (with a past seven-day recall period) for estimating the time spent in sleep, SB, light physical activity (LPA), and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) among adults. A sample of 126 adults was recruited. DABQ was administered to the participants on two occasions seven days apart to examine its test-retest reliability. The convergent validity of DABQ estimates was explored against activPAL4 accelerometer/inclinometer estimates. Intraclass correlation coefficients for absolute agreement and consistency between the times spent in sleep, SB, LPA, and MVPA estimated by DABQ in the test and re-test ranged from 0.59 to 0.69. Spearman's correlations between the times spent in sleep, SB, LPA, and MVPA estimated by DABQ and activPAL4 ranged from 0.38 to 0.66. In terms of reliability and validity, DABQ is comparable with existing questionnaires; however, it has an important advantage of enabling a comprehensive assessment of all four 24-h movement behaviours. The measurement properties of DABQ make it suitable for large-scale epidemiological studies on 24-h movement behaviours.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing widespread adoption across industry sectors ranging from supply chain management to smart cities, buildings, and health monitoring. However, most software ...architectures for the IoT deployment rely on centralized cloud computing infrastructures to provide storage and computing power, as cloud providers have high economic incentives to organize their infrastructure into clusters. Despite these incentives, there has been a recent shift from centralized to decentralized architectures that harness the potential of edge devices, reduce network latency, and lower infrastructure costs to support IoT applications. This shift has resulted in new edge computing architectures, but many still rely on centralized solutions for managing applications. A truly decentralized approach would offer interesting properties required for IoT use cases. In this paper, we introduce a decentralized architecture tailored for large-scale deployments of peer-to-peer IoT sensor networks and capable of run-time application migration. We propose a leader election consensus protocol for permissioned distributed networks that only requires one series of messages in order to commit to a change. The solution combines a blockchain consensus protocol using Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF) to achieve decentralized randomness, fault tolerance, transparency, and no single point of failure. We validate our solution by testing and analyzing the performance of our reference implementation. Our results show that nodes are able to reach consensus consistently, and the VDF proofs can be used as an entropy pool for decentralized randomness. We show that our system can perform autonomous real-time application migrations. Finally, we conclude that the implementation is scalable by testing it on 100 consensus nodes running 200 applications.
People seem to function and feel better in indoor natural environments, including spaces furnished with wood. When restorative effects of indoor spaces are not detected, suboptimal methodological ...approaches may be responsible, including stress-inducing activities and measures of affective states and cognitive performance. Our primary objectives were to test (1) whether the Mental Arithmetic Task (MAT) can reliably induce stress and measure cognitive performance, and (2) whether two single-item measures of pleasure and arousal can detect changes in affective states in restoration research. Our secondary objective was to examine whether stress recovery and cognitive performance differ between indoor settings furnished with or without wood. Twenty-two participants, allocated to a space furnished with either a wooden or a white desktop, completed MAT twice, while their electrodermal and cardiovascular activity and affective states were monitored. Participants on average responded to MAT with increased subjective arousal but unchanged subjective pleasure, and with increased physiological arousal on some but not all parameters, suggesting that MAT was effortful but not necessarily stressful. Scores on MAT improved at the 2nd administration, suggesting that MAT did not induce cognitive fatigue at the 1st administration and that its role as a cognitive task in restoration research may be limited. The items assessing affective states performed well. The measured outcomes did not differ between the wooden and non-wooden setting, suggesting that substantial restorative effects of a wooden desktop are unlikely, and that higher wood coverage is needed to increase the chances of observing restorative effects.
Visually pleasing materials and furnishings may be an important component of pleasant, restorative indoor spaces, where people can rest, relax, and recover from stress. We conducted two studies to ...examine human preferences for different wooden desk materials and designs. In Study 1, 77 participants evaluated the visual appearance of 20 wooden materials and 18 desk designs, in which desk elements and their arrangements were systematically varied. The three highest rated wooden materials and desk designs from Study 1 were combined in 18 new desks evaluated by 80 participants in terms of visual appearance in Study 2, where we systematically varied the type of material, amount of material, and desk design. The results show that preference for different materials and desks varies greatly from person to person, but several evaluated items are on average preferred to others. Study 1 shows that certain materials, desk elements, and the arrangements of those elements received higher preference ratings than others. Study 2 indicates that the type of material, amount of material, and desk design all play a significant role in human preference for the visual appearance of desks. Researchers and designers can build on these findings to create aesthetically appealing indoor environments that have the potential to positively impact human wellbeing.
Muscle Activation Sequence in Flywheel Squats Spudić, Darjan; Smajla, Darjan; David Burnard, Michael ...
International journal of environmental research and public health,
03/2021, Letnik:
18, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Muscle coordination is important for rational and effective planning of therapeutic and exercise interventions using equipment that mimics functional movements. Our study was the first to assess ...muscle coordination during flywheel (FW) squats.
Time-of-peak electromyographic activation order was assessed separately for 8, 4, and 3 leg muscles under four FW loads. A sequential rank agreement permutations tests (SRA) were conducted to assess activation order and Kendall's tau was used to assess the concordance of activation order across subjects, loads and expected order of activation.
SRA revealed a latent muscle activation order at loads 0.05, 0.075, and 0.1, but not at 0.025 kg·m
. Kendall's tau showed moderate-to-strong concordance between the expected (proximal-to-distal) and the observed muscle activation order only at a load 0.025 kg·m
, regardless of the number of muscles analyzed. Muscle activation order was highly concordant between loads 0.05, 0.075, and 0.1 kg·m
.
The results show a specific role of each muscle during the FW squat that is load-dependent. While the lowest load follows the proximal-to-distal principle of muscle activation, higher loads lead to a reorganization of the underlying muscle coordination mechanisms. They require a specific and stable muscle coordination pattern that is not proximal-to-distal.
Visual and tactile properties of materials can influence human emotional and cognitive functioning. Existing studies indicate that exposure to wood may lead to more favourable outcomes than contact ...with other common materials, but evidence is limited. We measured affective states and cognitive performance in 16 participants before and after each spent 15 min at 10 desks with differing top surfaces. Desk surfaces were made of untreated, oiled, or lacquered spruce or oak solid wood, laminated or oak-veneered particleboard, glass, and mineral-filled thermoplastic composite. The results indicate that cognitive performance and affective states of participants did not differ between the desk surfaces. It appears that exposure to a relatively small wooden surface does not significantly influence affective and cognitive outcomes. Incorporating larger amounts of wood coverage and a more demanding cognitive task would probably increase the chances of capturing the potential effects of wood exposure on human affective states and cognitive performance.
Natural elements, life and life-like processes, as well as representations of them, can produce positive experiences within the built environment. Over the past decade, a number of empirical studies ...have found experiencing nature, both actively and passively, can reduce stress, increase human well-being, and produce positive emotional experiences. Therefore, in this study, user perceptions of building material naturalness in three European countries, Finland, Norway, and Slovenia were investigated. A survey was conducted in each country to gather user perceptions of the naturalness of 22 building materials. Perceptions were collected in three ways: a binary decision task (e.g. natural or not natural), a seven-point scale from not natural to natural, and an ordered ranking of all specimens from most natural to least natural. The building materials included solid wood, engineered wood-based products, masonry, stone, wallpaper, ceramic tiles, metal, and plastic. Solid wood, stone, and brick were clearly considered more natural than their counterparts with greater degrees of processing. Similarly, wood-based composites with greater degrees of processing were identified as being less natural than materials with less processing. Furthermore, the study found there was agreement between regions on building material naturalness, despite some minor differences.
According to recently published 24-hour movement guidelines, adults should spend: ≥150 minutes/week in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA); <8 hours/day in sedentary behaviour (SB); and 7-9 ...hours/day sleeping.
We explored the association between meeting these recommendations and low back pain (LBP)-the most common musculoskeletal disorder.
We collected self-reported data from 2333 adults about: MVPA, SB and sleep duration; frequency and intensity of LBP; and sociodemographic and lifestyle characteristics.
Meeting a combination of SB and sleep recommendations was associated with lower odds of LBP in the past week and past month (adjusted odds ratio
: 0.64 and 0.52, respectively;
< 0.05 for both). Among LBP sufferers, meeting any combination of recommendations that includes sleep was associated with lower odds of frequent (
range: 0.49-0.61;
< 0.05 for all) and intense (
range: 0.39-0.66;
< 0.05 for all) LBP in the past week, while meeting a combination of SB and sleep recommendations or all three recommendations was associated with lower odds of intense LBP in the past month and past year (
range: 0.50-0.68;
< 0.05 for all). The likelihood of experiencing higher frequency and intensity of LBP decreased with the number of recommendations met (
for linear trend < 0.05).
Meeting the SB and sleep recommendations in combination is associated with a lower likelihood of LBP, while adhering to the overall 24-hour movement guidelines or any combination of recommendations that includes sleep is associated with lower frequency and intensity of LBP among LBP sufferers.
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