Abstract Virtual reality (VR) Rehabilitation holds the potential to address the challenge that patients feel bored and give up long-term rehabilitation training. Despite the introduction of gaming ...elements by some researchers in rehabilitation training to enhance engagement, there remains a notable lack of in-depth research on VR rehabilitation serious game design methods, particularly the absence of a concrete design framework for VR rehabilitation serious games. Hence, we introduce the Clinical-Function-Interesting (CFI): a VR rehabilitation serious game design framework, harmonizing rehabilitation function and game design theories. The framework initiates with clinic information, defining game functions through the functional decomposition of rehabilitation training. Subsequently, it integrates gaming elements identified through the analysis and comparison of related literature to provide enduring support for long-term training. Furthermore, VR side-effect and enhancement are considered. Building upon this design framework, we have developed an upper limb VR rehabilitation serious game tailored for mild to moderate stroke patients and aligned our framework with another developed VR rehabilitation serious game to validate its practical feasibility. Overall, the proposed design framework offers a systematic VR rehabilitation serious game design methodology for the VR rehabilitation field, assisting developers in more accurately designing VR rehabilitation serious games that are tailored to specific rehabilitation goals.
In response to the ever-increasing demand of lower limb rehabilitation, this paper presents a novel robot-assisted gait trainer (RGT) to assist the elderly and the pediatric patients with ...neurological impairments in the lower limb rehabilitation training (LLRT). The RGT provides three active degrees of freedom (DoF) to both legs that are used to implement the gait cycle in such a way that the natural gait is not significantly affected. The robot consists of (i) the partial body weight support (PBWS) system to assist patients in sit-to-stand transfer via the precision linear rail system and (ii) the bipedal end-effector (BE) to control the motions of lower limbs via two mechanical arms. The robot stands out for multiple modes of training and optimized functional design to improve the quality of life for those patients. To analyze the performance of the RGT, the kinematic and static models are established in this paper. After that, the reachable workspace and motion trajectory are analyzed to cover the motion requirements and implement natural gait cycle. The preliminary results demonstrate the usability of the robot.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of transportation infrastructure, the quality and condition of road networks play a pivotal role in societal progress and economic growth. In the realm of road ...distress detection, traditional methods have long grappled with manual intervention and high costs, requiring trained observers for time-consuming and expensive data collection processes. The limitations of these approaches are compounded by challenges in adapting to diverse road surfaces and handling low-resolution data, particularly in early automated distress survey technologies. This article addresses the critical need for efficient road distress detection, a key component of ensuring safe and reliable transportation systems. Effectively addressing these challenges is crucial for enhancing the efficiency, accuracy, and safety of road distress detection systems. Leveraging advancements in object detection, we introduce the Innovative Road Distress Detection (IR-DD), a novel framework that integrates the YOLOv8 algorithm to enhance the accuracy and real-time capabilities of road distress detection, catering to applications such as smart cities and autonomous vehicles. Our approach incorporates bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) recursive feature fusion and bidirectional connections to optimize the utilization of multi-scale features, addressing challenges related to information loss and gradients encountered in traditional methods. Comprehensive experimental analysis demonstrates the superior performance, efficiency, and robustness of our integrated approach, positioning it as a cost-effective and compelling alternative to conventional road distress detection methods. Our findings demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to other state-of-the-art methods across various evaluation metrics, including precision, recall, F1 score, and mean average precision (mAP) at different intersection over union (IoU) thresholds. Specifically, our method achieves notable results with a precision of 0.666, F1 score of 0.630, mAP@0.5 of 0.650, all while operating at a speed of 86 frames per second (FPS). These outcomes underscore the effectiveness of our approach in real-time road distress detection. This article contributes to the ongoing innovation in object detection techniques, emphasizing the practicality and effectiveness of our proposed solution in advancing the field of road distress detection.
With the improvement of the quality of life, the demands on button mushroom (Agaricus Bisporus) increase significantly. But traditional farming methods mainly rely on costly human picking, which is ...currently facing the time-consuming and labor-intensive problem. As machine vision technology becomes more mature, harvesting robot with flexible picking end-effector is an alternative method to address this issue. Though the conventional harvesting robot is capable of mushrooms picking, but the damage rate is relatively high for the improper picking force and motion. Thus, a novel picking end-effector for button mushrooms is designed based on vacuum negative pressure picking in this paper. The harvesting robot with flexible end-effector is proposed to solve the problem: 1) to avoid the injury when the end-effector touch the mushroom; 2) to increase the picking efficiency without damage rate increase. The structure of robotic mushroom picking end-effector is described in detail, and then the kinematic modeling and picking force analysis of this robot are presented. Lastly, the numerical simulation via the MATLAB is carried out to study the influence of the robot parameters. The bruise tests indicated that the maximal allowable stress is 0.196 MPa and mean allowable pressure is 13.82 N. Preliminary results demonstrate that the robot achieved 88.2% success rate and 2.9% damage rate in the factory environment, and there is potential for the automatic mushroom harvesting with the proposed harvesting robot.
A cornerstone of the rehabilitative regime for people diagnosed with dyskinesia is walking assist and gait training, however, prolonged care, provided by relatives or professionals, serves as a ...massive financial burden to patients. The proposed novel robotic walker seeks to address this concern. The walker incorporates human motion intention recognition to facilitate lower limb rehabilitation training and daily walking. The walker design places strong emphasis on patient safety and quality of life by providing omni-directional walking assist, four key pelvic motions that support hip rotations and comfortable body weight support (BWS). Additionally, five sensors were installed to identify the user's motion intention from the interaction forces surrounding the pelvis and dead zone. Furthermore, Kalman filtering was used to guarantee the quality of the interactive signal while kinematic and dynamic models were derived to generate appropriate driving velocities to support patient's body weight and improve mobility. To validate our design, MATLAB simulations and exploratory clinical trials using healthy subjects were performed. Preliminary results demonstrate satisfactory kinematic performance and suggest the walker as a promising therapeutic avenue for individuals suffering from dyskinesia and other associated movement disorders.
Introduction In the evolving healthcare landscape, we aim to integrate hyperspectral imaging into Hybrid Health Care Units to advance the diagnosis of medical diseases through the effective fusion of ...cutting-edge technology. The scarcity of medical hyperspectral data limits the use of hyperspectral imaging in disease classification. Methods Our study innovatively integrates hyperspectral imaging to characterize tumor tissues across diverse body locations, employing the Sharpened Cosine Similarity framework for tumor classification and subsequent healthcare recommendation. The efficiency of the proposed model is evaluated using Cohen's kappa, overall accuracy, and f1-score metrics. Results The proposed model demonstrates remarkable efficiency, with kappa of 91.76%, an overall accuracy of 95.60%, and an f1-score of 96%. These metrics indicate superior performance of our proposed model over existing state-of-the-art methods, even in limited training data. Conclusion This study marks a milestone in hybrid healthcare informatics, improving personalized care and advancing disease classification and recommendations.
Small-scaled robotic walkers play an increasingly important role in Activity of Daily Living (ADL) assistance in the face of ever-increasing rehab requirements and existing equipment drawbacks. This ...paper proposes a Rehabilitation Robotic Walker (RRW) for walking assistance and body weight support (BWS) during gait rehabilitation.
The walker provides the patients with weight offloading and guiding force to mimic a series of the physiotherapist's (PT's) movements, and creates a natural, comfortable, and safe environment. This system consists of an omnidirectional mobile platform, a BWS mechanism, and a pelvic brace to smooth the motions of the pelvis. To recognize the human intentions, four force sensors, two joysticks, and one depth-sensing camera were used to monitor the human-machine information, and a multimodal fusion algorithm for intention recognition was proposed to improve the accuracy. Then the system obtained the heading angle E, the pelvic pose F, and the motion vector H via the camera, the force sensors, and the joysticks respectively, classified the intentions with feature extraction and information fusion, and finally outputted the motor speed control through the robot's kinematics.
To validate the validity of the algorithm above, a preliminary test with three volunteers was conducted to study the motion control. The results showed that the average error of the integral square error (ISE) was 2.90 and the minimum error was 1.96.
The results demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed method, and that the system is capable of providing walking assistance.
We aimed to identify hub genes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) plasma through the exploration of a putative miRNA-mRNA regulatory network.
Three datasets (GSE24709, GSE102915, ...GSE136390) were utilized to discern differentially expressed miRNAs (DEMs) between COPD and normal plasma. miRNET was employed to predict the potential targets of DEMs. Subsequent GO and KEGG analyses were conducted using DAVID. For the construction of the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and screening of hub genes, STRING and Cytoscape were employed. The expression validation was assessed through GSE56768.
The results revealed 395 genes targeted by up-regulated DEMs and 234 genes targeted by down-regulated DEMs. The target genes exhibited significant enrichment in the PI3K-Akt signaling pathway and the p53 signaling pathway. Through the validation of hub genes' expression, we proposed two potential miRNA-mRNA interactions: miR-126-5p/miR-495-3p/miR-193b-3p - YWHAZ and miR-937-5p/miR-183-5p/miR-34c-5p/miR-98-5p/miR-525-3p/miR-215-5p - ACTB.
In conclusion, our study posits potential miRNA-mRNA interactions in COPD by analyzing datasets from public databases, contributing valuable insights into the understanding of COPD pathogenesis and potential therapeutic avenues.
Along with China entering an aging society, the percentage of people that over 60 will reach 34.9% in 2050, resulted in a significant increase in stroke patients.
This paper proposes a rehabilitation ...robotic walker for walking assistance during the daily life, and a control method for the motor relearning during the gait training. The walker consists of an omni-directional mobile platform (OMP) which ensures the walker can move on the ground, a body weight support system (BWS) which is capable of providing the desired unloading force, and a pelvic assist mechanism (PAM) to provide the user with four degrees of freedom and avoid the rigid impact. The study goal is to gain a better understanding of the assist-as-needed control strategy during the gait training.
For the man-machine interaction control, the assist-as-needed control strategy is adopted to guide the users' motions and improve the interaction experience. To build the force field in the three-dimensional space, the dynamics of the system is derived to increase the accuracy of force control.
The simulation results show that the force field around the motion trajectory was generated in the three-dimensional space. In order to understand the force field, we designed the simulation on sagittal plane and the controller can generate the appropriate force field. The preliminary experiment results were consistent with the simulation results.
Based on the mathematical simulation and the preliminary test, the results demonstrate that the proposed system can provide the guide force around the target trajectory, the accuracy of force control still remains to be improved.
Two new lanostane-type triterpenoids, ganoderenicfys A (1) and B (2), together with six related known terpenoids (3-8), were isolated and identified from the fruiting body of Ganoderma applanatum. ...The structures of these compounds were established on the basis of detailed interpretation of their NMR and HRESIMS data. The absolute configurations of 1 and 2 were determined by quantum chemical electronic circular dichroism (ECD) calculations. All of the isolated compounds were evaluated for their proangiogenic activities in a transgenic fluorescent zebrafish model. Compounds 1-6 displayed dose-dependently proangiogenic activity in a PTK787-induced vascular injury zebrafish model, while compounds 1, 2 and 4 significantly promoted the angiogenesis. This is the first report for proangiogenic activities of lanostane-type triterpenoids.
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