Movements Of Body Parts Research Articles

Double Layer HMM Body Part Motion Recognition Based on Fuzzy Theory

Double Layer HMM Body Part Motion Recognition Based on Fuzzy Theory

Are there cortical somatotopic motor maps outside of the human precentral gyrus?

Human body movements are supported by a somatotopic map - primary motor cortex (M1) - that is found along the precentral gyrus. Recent evidence has suggested two further motor maps that span the lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC) and the precuneus. Confirmation of these maps is important, as they influence our understanding of the organisation of motor behaviour, for example by revealing how visual- and motor-related activity interact. However, evidence for these recently proposed maps is limited. We analysed an open fMRI dataset of 62 participants who moved performed twelve different body part movements. We analysed the magnitude of responses evoked by movements with novel quantitative indices that test for map-like organisation. We found strong evidence for bilateral somatotopic maps in precentral and postcentral gyri. In LOTC, we found much weaker responses to movement, and little evidence of somatotopy. In the precuneus, we found only limited evidence for somatotopy. We also adopted a background connectivity approach to examine correlations between M1, LOTC and the precuneus in the residual time-series data. This revealed a ventral-posterior / dorsal-anterior distinction in the connectivity between precuneus and M1, favouring the head and arms, respectively. Posterior right hemisphere LOTC showed some evidence of preferential connectivity to arm-selective regions of M1. Overall, our results do not support the existence of a somatotopic motor map in LOTC but provide some support for a coarse map in the precuneus, especially as revealed in connectivity patterns. These findings help clarify the organisation of human motor representations beyond the precentral gyrus.

Body Language in Ancient Arabic Poetry: A Cognitive Approach

In the study of ancient Arabic poetry, it is customary to investigate its verbal structures, rhythmic prosody, and both apparent and hidden meanings related to its content and purposes. However, a rich field for scholarly exploration emerges when one delves into the non-verbal expressions found within this poetry, even though it heavily relies on words. By this, we refer to the body language present in poetic texts, which give rise to symbolic connotations generated by the active interaction between the trinity of body, perception, and the world. In this research endeavor, we employ the theoretical framework of embodied cognition, with a particular focus on the concepts of Conceptual Metaphor and Conceptual Blending. Our aim is to explore the cultural, social, and civilizational nuances inherent in the corporeal expressions depicted within ancient Arabic poetry, spanning themes of admiration, satire, pride, love, and elegy. Furthermore, in addition to what the movements of body parts reveal about the various purposes of poetry, conveying encoded cultural messages carried by the body as a means of expression in different symbolic systems, this research leads to an understanding of the interactive semiotic systems in ancient Arabic poetry. Bodies, whether describing or described, interact in two dimensions: the material and the symbolic, distributed across layers of meaning, ranging from the individual (the poet as a self who uses his body as an intermediary between himself and the world) to the collective (family, tribe, nation, human community, etc.). This approach is hoped to reveal the authentic status of ancient Arabic poetry as a universal literature with cosmic elements, making it a mirror for the entire world, not just its Arab environment.

Contextual visual and motion salient fusion framework for action recognition in dark environments

Infrared (IR) human action recognition (AR) exhibits resilience against shifting illumination conditions, changes in appearance, and shadows. It has valuable applications in numerous areas of future sustainable and smart cities including robotics, intelligent systems, security, and transportation. However, current IR-based recognition approaches predominantly concentrate on spatial or local temporal information and often overlook the potential value of global temporal patterns. This oversight can lead to incomplete representations of body part movements and prevent accurate optimization of a network. Therefore, a contextual-motion coalescence network (CMCNet) is proposed that operates in a streamlined and end-to-end manner for robust action representation in darkness in a near-infrared (NIR) setting. Initially, data are preprocessed to separate foreground, normalized, and resized. The framework employs two parallel modules: the contextual visual features learning module (CVFLM) for local feature extraction, and the temporal optical flow learning module (TOFLM) for acquiring motion dynamics. These modules focus on action-relevant regions used shift window-based operations to ensure accurate interpretation of motion information. The coalescence block harmoniously integrates the contextual and motion features within a unified framework. Finally, the temporal decoder module discriminatively identifies the boundaries of the action sequence. This sequence of steps ensures the synergistic optimization of both CVFLM and TOFLM and thorough competent feature extraction for precise AR. Evaluations of CMCNet are carried out on publicly available datasets, InfAR and NTURGB-D, where superior performance is achieved. Our model yields the highest average precision of 89% and 85% on these datasets, respectively, representing an improvement of 2.25% (on InfAR) compared to conventional methods operating at spatial and optical flow levels which underscores its efficacy.

Fabrication of rare earth-doped ZnO-PVDF flexible nanocomposite films for ferroelectric response and their application in piezo-responsive bending sensors.

The present study covers the fabrication of flexible piezoelectric nanogenerators and their application towards sustainable power generation. The rod-like structure of erbium-doped ZnO (EZ) nanoparticles prepared by the hydrothermal synthesis route was successfully incorporated inside the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) matrix using the solution casting method. Solution casting is an easy and cost-effective method for fabricating laminated, thin, flexible and lightweight EZ-PVDF nanocomposite films. The formation of the desired crystallographic phase of EZ-PVDF nanocomposite films and the presence of rod-like EZ nanoparticles inside the PVDF matrix were confirmed using X-ray diffraction and FESEM. The enhancement of the β-phase fraction of the EZ-PVDF nanocomposite films as compared to bare PVDF was estimated using FTIR spectroscopy. The presence of a ferroelectric phase in the EZ-PVDF nanocomposite films was found due to the formation of a large area of interfaces between the EZ nanoparticles and the PVDF matrix. The maximum polarizations of 0.00696 μC cm-2 and 0.00683 μC cm-2 for two samples (EZP1 and EZP2, respectively) were observed at an electric field of 1.25 kV cm-1. The piezoelectric voltages were observed at relatively low frequencies for both nanocomposite films. The maximum piezoelectric voltages of 18.9 V and 15.5 V were observed at a 1 Hz frequency for EZP1 and EZP2, respectively. The output piezoelectric current of 16.88 mA and the maximum power density of 7773.68 W m-3 for EZP1 ensure its potential as an efficient piezoelectric nanogenerator with greater efficiency than those reported previously in published articles. The change in the piezoelectric voltage response of the nanocomposite films as a function of mechanical movement of human external body parts renders them the most suitable candidate for human-machine interfacing (HMI) applications, such as bending sensors and human motion sensors.

Dynamic reconstruction for digital tomosynthesis: a phantom proof of concept for breast care

Objective. Digital tomosynthesis (DTS) is a type of limited-angle Computed Tomography (CT) used in orthopedic and oncology care to provide a pseudo-3D reconstructed volume of a body part from multiple x-ray projections. Patient motion during acquisitions results in artifacts which affect screening and diagnostic performances. Hence, accurate reconstruction of moving body parts from a tomosynthesis projection series is addressed in this paper, with a particular focus on the breast. The aim of this paper is to assess the feasibility of a novel dynamic reconstruction technique for DTS and evaluate its accuracy compared to an available ground truth. Approach. The proposed method is a combination of a 4D dynamic tomography strategy leveraging the formalism of Projection-based Digital Volume Correlation (P-DVC) with a multiscale approach to estimate and correct patient motion. Iterations of two operations are performed: (i) a motion-corrected reconstruction based on the Simultaneous Iterative Reconstruction Technique (SIRT) algorithm and (ii) a motion estimation from projection residuals, to obtain motion-free volumes. Performance is evaluated on a synthetic Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) case. Three slabs of a CIRS breast phantom are imaged on a Senographe PristinaTM, under plate-wise rigid body motions with amplitudes ranging up to 10 mm so that an independent measurement of the motion can be accessed. Results. Results show a motion estimation average precision down to 0.183 mm (1.83 voxels), when compared to the independent measurement. Moreover, an 84.2% improvement on the mean residual error and a 59.9% improvement on the root mean square error (RMSE) with the original static reconstruction are obtained. Significance. Visual and quantitative assessments of the dynamically reconstructed volumes show that the proposed method fully restores conspicuity for important clinical features contained in the phantom.

Motor somatotopy impacts imagery strategy success in human intracortical brain-computer interfaces.

The notion of a somatotopically organized motor cortex, with movements of different body parts being controlled by spatially distinct areas of cortex, is well known. However, recent studies have challenged this notion and suggested a more distributed representation of movement control. This shift in perspective has significant implications, particularly when considering the implantation location of electrode arrays for intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs). We sought to evaluate whether the location of neural recordings from the precentral gyrus, and thus the underlying somatotopy, has any impact on the imagery strategies that can enable successful iBCI control. Three individuals with a spinal cord injury were enrolled in an ongoing clinical trial of an iBCI. Participants had two intracortical microelectrode arrays implanted in the arm and/or hand areas of the precentral gyrus based on presurgical functional imaging. Neural data were recorded while participants attempted to perform movements of the hand, wrist, elbow, and shoulder. We found that electrode arrays that were located more medially recorded significantly more activity during attempted proximal arm movements (elbow, shoulder) than did lateral arrays, which captured more activity related to attempted distal arm movements (hand, wrist). We also evaluated the relative contribution from the two arrays implanted in each participant to decoding accuracy during calibration of an iBCI decoder for translation and grasping tasks. For both task types, imagery strategy (e.g., reaching vs. wrist movements) had a significant impact on the relative contributions of each array to decoding. Overall, we found some evidence of broad tuning to arm and hand movements; however, there was a clear bias in the amount of information accessible about each movement type in spatially distinct areas of cortex. These results demonstrate that classical concepts of somatotopy can have real consequences for iBCI use, and highlight the importance of considering somatotopy when planning iBCI implantation.

Applying learning-from-observation to household service robots: three task common-sense formulations

Utilizing a robot in a new application requires the robot to be programmed at each time. To reduce such programmings efforts, we have been developing “Learning-from-observation (LfO)” that automatically generates robot programs by observing human demonstrations. So far, our previous research has been in the industrial domain. From now on, we want to expand the application field to the household-service domain. One of the main issues with introducing this LfO system into the domain is the cluttered environments, which makes it difficult to discern which movements of the human body parts and their relationships with environment objects are crucial for task execution when observing demonstrations. To overcome this issue, it is necessary for the system to have task common-sense shared with the human demonstrator to focus on the demonstrator's specific movements. Here, task common-sense is defined as the movements humans take almost unconsciously to streamline or optimize the execution of a series of tasks. In this paper, we extract and define three types of task common-sense (semi-conscious movements) that should be focused on when observing demonstrations of household tasks and propose representations to describe them. Specifically, the paper proposes to use labanotation to describe the whole-body movements with respect to the environment, contact-webs to describe the hand-finger movements with respect to the tool for grasping, and physical and semantic constraints to describe the movements of the hand with the tool with respect to the environment. Based on these representations, the paper formulates task models, machine-independent robot programs, that indicate what-to-do and where-to-do. In this design process, the necessary and sufficient set of task models to be prepared in the task-model library are determined on the following criteria: for grasping tasks, according to the classification of contact-webs along the purpose of the grasping, and for manipulation tasks, corresponding to possible transitions between states defined by either physical constraints and semantic constraints. The skill-agent library is also prepared to collect skill-agents corresponding to tasks. The skill-agents in the library are pre-trained using reinforcement learning with the reward functions designed based on the physical and semantic constraints to execute the task when specific parameters are provided. Third, the paper explains the task encoder to obtain task models and task decoder to execute the task models on the robot hardware. The task encoder understands what-to-do from the verbal input and retrieves the corresponding task model in the library. Next, based on the knowledge of each task, the system focuses on specific parts of the demonstration to collect where-to-do parameters for executing the task. The decoder constructs a sequence of skill-agents retrieving from the skill-agnet library corresponding and inserts those parameters obtained from the demonstration into these skill-agents, allowing the robot to perform task sequences with following the Labanotation postures. Finally, this paper presents how the system actually works through several example scenes.

Investigation of the reliability and validity of the Turkish version of the Comprehensive Coordination Scale in patients with Parkinson's disease

ObjectiveThe Comprehensive Coordination Scale (CCS) is a valid, reliable scale for evaluating motor coordination, described as the ability to produce context-dependent movements of multiple body parts in both spatial and temporal domains in patients with chronic stroke. The aim of this study was to develop a Turkish version of the CCS that can be used to evaluate coordination in Parkinson's disease patients and to test its validity and reliability. MethodsThirty-four patients with Parkinson’s disease (18 females, 16 males) with a mean age of 67.55± 10.93 years were included. The 9-Hole Peg Test (9 HPT), Timed Up and Go Test (TUG), Berg Balance Scale (BBS), Functional Reach Test (FRT), and Modified Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) were administered to the patients. ResultsIn the correlation analysis for convergent validity, the CCS-TR showed a moderate negative correlation with both the 9 HPT and the TUG test (r=-0.684 and −0.641, respectively). There were also moderate positive correlations observed between the CCS-TR and the FRT and BBS (r=0.607 and 0.657, respectively). The total CCS-TR had excellent intrarater reliability (ICC=0.99; 95 % CI: 0.98–0.99) and interrater reliability (ICC=0.90; 95 % CI: 0.81–0.95). The CCS-TR subscales had excellent intrarater reliability (ICC: range 0.98 from 0.99). For intrarater agreement, the ICC was 0.99, and for interrater agreement, the ICC was 0.90 (excellent agreement). ConclusionThe results of the present study indicate that the Turkish version of the CCS is a reliable and valid coordination scale that can be used in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

Robust Methods for Assessing the Characteristics of Locomotor Activity Based on Markerless Video Capture Data

Introduction. Analysis of locomotor activity is essential in a number of biomedical and pharmacological research designs, as well as environmental monitoring. The movement trajectories of biological objects can be represented by time series exhibiting a complex multicomponent structure and non-stationary dynamics, thus limiting the effectiveness of conventional correlation and spectral time series analysis methods. Recordings obtained using markerless technologies are typically characterized by enhanced noise levels, including both instrumental noise and anomalous errors associated with false estimates of the location of the points of interest, as well as gaps in the trajectories, promoting an urgent need in the development of robust methods to assess the characteristics of locomotor activity.Aim. Development of robust methods for assessing the characteristics of locomotor activity capable of efficient processing of noisy recordings obtained by markerless video-based motion capture systems.Materials and methods. In order to assess the characteristics of locomotor activity, the relative movements of body parts of laboratory animals were analyzed using the stability metrics of the mutual dynamics of their trajectories, their relative delays, as well as the relative duration of the recording fragments when relatively stable mutual dynamics could be observed. The local maxima of the cross-correlation function of two body fragments, the minima of the standard deviation of the difference between their Hilbert phases, as well as their relative delays, were used as the metrics of mutual dynamics.Results. The considered phase metrics were shown to explicitly reflect changes in locomotor activity, while the assessment of time delays using phase metric was shown to be prone to periodic error. The above limitation could be largely overcome using the correlation metrics, assuming that phase and correlation metrics could be combined.Conclusion. The proposed robust methods provide stable estimates of the characteristics of locomotor activity based on markerless video capture recordings, altogether increasing the efficiency of diagnostic procedures and assessment of the therapeutic effect during rehabilitation.

On the Learning, Transmission, and Embodiment of Swimming’s Haptic Grammar

This article develops the concept of ‘haptic grammar’ to encourage greater scholarly focus on the sensory aspects of bodily motion used to generate movement, knowledge of one’s body in an environment, and thus being-in-the-world. It ethnographically examines how swimmers learn specific motions – ‘the catch’, sculling, hand entry – to illustrate broader questions of how we learn to move our bodies. Focusing on these specific motions emphasises the importance of shared sensory knowledge and perception for learning enskilled bodily movement. More than simply knowing what to move when and how, learning how to sense how one moves one’s body parts is a crucial social process that swimmers become more skilful at via interlocutions among themselves and with their coaches regarding specific motions of specific body parts. This article illustrates how such socialised knowledge requires a shared haptic grammar to become more skilful at moving through the water and thus become ‘swimmers’.

Struktur Gerak Tari Sayak di Desa Air Batu Kecamatan Ranah Pemberap Kabupaten Merangin Provinsi Jambi

The purpose of this study is to explain and describe the movement structure of Sayak Dance in Air Batu Village, Ranah Pemberap District, Merangin Regency, Jambi Province. This type of research is qualitative research with descriptive methods. Research instruments are researchers themselves and assisted by supporting instruments such as stationery and cameras. Data was collected through observation, interviews, and documentation. The steps of analyzing data are data collection, data reduction, data presentation and conclusions. The results showed that the relationship of basic elements, Sayak Dance has basic elements related to the attitude of the movement of body parts, starting from the head, body, hands, feet. The attitudes and movements contained in the Sayak Dance consist of: 1) attitudes and movements seen in a) the attitude of the head is upright, upright motion on the head does not exist. 2) Posture and gestures are seen in: a) upright, upright and leaning forward posture b) Motion on the body is absent 3) Posture and hand gestures are seen in: a) attitude on the hand lift sambah b) motion on the hand open straight sambah, open right sambah, pat me up, pat the right side of the leaf, pat the bottom slap, pat the back 4) attitude and motion on the feet seen in: a) attitude of the right foot, squat, middle stance, right lift, lift left, and bend. The grammatical hierarchical relationship system contained in Sayak Dance consists of 15 motifs, 8 phrases, 4 sentences and 1 cluster. Sayak dance includes syntagmatic relationships, relationships that are like links that cannot be separated or exchanged between the sati and others.

The Expectations of eSport Becomes Part of Sports

The development of science and technology in the 21st century is increasingly rapid, as can be seen by the race of telecommunications companies to create communication tools that offer convenience. As a global industry considered from a financial perspective, eSport is receiving attention from various circles and is being developed to increase competition interest and financial benefits. Sports usually include forms of physical exercise that require strength, endurance, and motor skills. Sports and eSport are different. eSport players don't always move physically despite participating in competitions and rivalries. According to some experts, eSport are a subset of sports. The method used is library research in the form of article review. The implementation of library research consists of investigating, mapping, combining, and evaluating previous research findings on a particular topic or field of knowledge. This method uses various sources of information, including primary articles (n=29). The point is that eSport players tend to be sedentary lifestyle players, which results in problems with fitness and health, so it is not in accordance with the impact of traditional sports physical activities that use large muscles to move body parts while moving. The status of eSport in sport is being questioned in Sport Science studies, as it does not have a positive impact on the fitness and health of eSport players unlike traditional sports athletes. It is increasingly clear that eSport should be seen as electronic entertainment and competition rather than as part of a sport that includes dominant physical activity.

Personalized Full-Body In-Bed Gym at home: lessons from personal experiences

Muscles and mobility deteriorate with age, and exercising is the only sure countermeasure. It is useful to offer safe and toll-free rehabilitation training, such as the Full-Body In-Bed Gym, easy to learn and perform at home. Based on my own experience, I suggest a 10-20-minute daily routine of easy and safe physical exercises that may improve the main 200-300 skeletal muscles used for everyday activities. Many of the exercises can be performed in bed (Full-Body In-Bed Gym), so hospital patients can learn this light workout before leaving the hospital. The routine consists of a series of repetitions of bodyweight exercises to be performed one after the other, without time breaks in between. Alternating sequences of arm and leg exercises are followed by moving body parts in lying and sitting positions in bed and by standing and sitting down. Progressive improvements can be tested by a series of push-ups on the bed or the floor. Starting from 3-5, the number of repetitions is increased by adding 5 more every week. To maintain or even shorten the total daily time of workout, each movement is then speeded up. The devoted time every morning (or at least 5 days a week) to train all the major muscles of the body can remain under 15 minutes. Because there are no breaks during and between sets, the final push-ups become very challenging. At the end of the daily workout, heart rate, depth, number of spontaneous ventilations, and frontal perspiration increase for several tens of minutes. Here is an example of how to implement the progression of the Full-Body In-Bed Gym, presenting an educational case report of a trained 80-year-old person in stable pharmacological management. Details of the workouts and the related results are presented in the 2024 book, How to Rejuvenate at 80’s. Positive results on quality of life, mental wellness, and persistence in a group of older adults were recently reported in a scientific publication. Although performed in bed, in addition to strengthening the main muscles, ventilatory ones included, Full-Body In-Bed Gym at home is a resistance training equivalent to a short jog. Started in early winter and continued regularly throughout spring and summer, Full-Body In-Bed Gym can help maintain the independence and mental wellness of elderly people. It is a simple approach that deserves further clinical trials.

Визуализация и классификация движений человека на основе скелетной структуры: Нейросетевой подход к анализу спортивных упражнений и сравнение методологий

The authors of the paper review and compare different existing approaches to Human Action Recognition (HAR), analyze the advantages and disadvantages of platforms for extracting human skeletal structure from video stream, and evaluate the importance of visual representation in the motion analysis process. This paper presents an example implementation of one of the approaches to HAR based on the use of interpretability and visual expressiveness inherent in skeletal structures. In this work, an ad hoc network with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for human activity classification is designed and implemented, which has been trained and tested in the domain of sports exercises. LSTM incorporation of memory cells and gating mechanisms not only mitigates the vanishing gradient problem but also enables LSTMs to selectively retain and utilize relevant information over extended sequences, making them highly effective in tasks with complex temporal dependencies. The problem with a fading gradient is quite common in deep neural networks and is that if the error is back propagated during the training of the network, the gradient can decrease strongly as it travels through the layers of the network to the initial layers. This can lead to the fact that the weights in the initial layers are practically not updated, which makes training of these layers impossible or slows down its process. The resulting solution can be used to create a real-time virtual fitness assistant. The resulting solution can be used to create a real-time virtual fitness assistant. In addition, this approach will make it possible to create interactive training applications with visualization of human skeletal structure, motion analysis and monitoring systems in the field of medicine and rehabilitation, as well as for the development of security systems with access control based on the analysis of visual data on the movement of human body parts.

Studying animal locomotion with multiple data loggers: quantifying time drift between tags

Temporal accuracy is a fundamental characteristic of logging technology and is needed to correlate data streams. Single biologgers sensing animal movement (accelerometers, gyroscope, magnetometers, collectively inertial measurement unit; IMU) have been extensively used to study the ecology of animals. To better capture whole body movement and increase the accuracy of behavior classification, there is a need to deploy multiple loggers on a single individual to capture the movement of multiple body parts. Yet due to temporal drift, accurately aligning multiple IMU datasets can be problematic, especially as deployment duration increases. In this paper we quantify temporal drift and errors in commercially available IMU data loggers using a combination of robotic and animal borne experiments. The variance in drift rate within a tag is over an order of magnitude lower (σ = 0.001 s h−1) than the variance between tags (σ = 0.015 s·h−1), showing that recording frequency is a characteristic of each tag and not a random variable. Furthermore, we observed a large offset (0.54 ± 0.016 s·h−1) between two groups of tags that had differing recording frequencies, and we observed three instances of instantaneous temporal jumps within datasets introducing errors into the data streams. Finally, we show that relative drift rates can be estimated even when deployed on animals displaying various behaviors without the tags needing to be simultaneously moved. For the tags used in this study, drift rates can vary significantly between tags, are repeatable, and can be accurately measured in the field. The temporal alignment of multiple tag datasets allows researchers to deploy multiple tags on an individual animal which will greatly increase our knowledge of movement kinematics and expand the range of movement characteristics that can be used for behavioral classification.

(Un)ergonomic working conditions for a paramedic in a medical ambulance

The work of a paramedic, is characterised by a high risk of injury. Ergonomic, psychological, and biomechanical factors are considered risk factors in the profession of emergency medical technicians. Ensuring ergonomic working conditions for emergency medical technicians is a priority and requires a thorough assessment both in the design process and during the operation of the ambulance, to provide a diagnosis of the current state and present necessary recommendations for modernization. Identifying stressors will enable the design of an ergonomic interior for the ambulance, ensuring comfort and reliability for members of the emergency medical team, thereby reducing the risk of injuries. The authors of this article developed a comprehensive methodology for assessing the nuisances occurring during the paramedic's work, which required specialised preliminary research. The research included the measurement and analysis of the paramedic's movement kinematics during typical medical procedures, both at a standstill and while driving the ambulance. For the analysis of motion kinematics, a non-invasive method called myoMotion was employed, and the study was conducted in a Mercedes ambulance. This article contains preliminary results on the evaluation of movement kinematics. These demonstrated the necessity for the paramedic to adopt forced positions when performing medical procedures. The ranges of movement of the individual body parts of the paramedic deviated from accepted norms, resulting in musculoskeletal overload. The acquired knowledge forms the basis for a detailed analysis of tasks performed within each procedure from the perspective of the spatial structure of the ambulance, the arrangement of equipment and medical supplies, their accessibility during work, and the organization of work within the ambulance. Additional identification of musculoskeletal system stress, its sources, and the formulation of modification recommendations for the ambulance interior will enable ensuring the comfort and reliability of the work for emergency medical teams, thereby reducing the risk of injuries in the workplace. Med Pr Work Health Saf. 2024;75(1):31-44.

The ‘after you’ gesture in a bird

Gestures are ubiquitous in human communication, involving movements of body parts produced for a variety of purposes, such as pointing out objects (deictic gestures) or conveying messages (symbolic gestures)1. While displays of body parts have been described in many animals2, their functional similarity to human gestures has primarily been explored in great apes3,4, with little research attention given to other animal groups. To date, only a few studies have provided evidence for deictic gestures in birds and fish5,6,7, but it is unclear whether non-primate animals can employ symbolic gestures, such as waving to mean 'goodbye', which are, in humans, more cognitively demanding than deictic gestures1. Here, we report that the Japanese tit (Parus minor), a socially monogamous bird, uses wing-fluttering to prompt their mated partner to enter the nest first, and that wing-fluttering functions as a symbolic gesture conveying a specific message ('after you'). Our findings encourage further research on animal gestures, which may help in understanding the evolution of complex communication, including language.

The effect of intense and distributed exercise in teaching the disease and controlling the compatibility of some body movements in sports walking among young women in Basmaya Sports Academy

This research dealt with the effect of intensive and distributed exercise on teaching to perform and control the compatibility of movements of body parts in athletic walking at the Basmaya Sports Academy for young women. The objective of the research focus on preparing special exercises with both intensive and distributed styles and identifying their effects in teaching , performing and control the compatibility of movements of body parts in athletic walking at the Basmaya Sports Academy For Young Women..The hypotheses included that there were statistically significant differences between the results of the pre and posttests of the two experimental research groups in teaching performance and controlling the motor compatibility of body parts in athletic walking. The research community was determined by the budding of the Basmaya Academy for the academic year 2019-2020, as the sample included (12) players ( female ) who were intentionally chosen from the beginners in teaching performance , controlling and matching the movements of body parts ..After the researcher made sure of the homogeneity of the sample, they were randomly distributed in two equal groups and performed parity in testing and evaluating the performance and kinetic compatibility of body parts in athletic walking. One of the groups represented the experimental group which is its teaching was according to intensive method ,while the other group used distributed method in teaching sport walking movements .The implementation of the main experiment took 5 weeks, with three teaching units per week. After the specified period, the tests and evaluations of the motions under study were re-examined. Statistical treatments were performed using the (spss) program by adopting the two tests (T) for the independent and interrelated samples. Conclusions showed excellence of 2nd group ( with distributed exercise ) and preference over first experimental group ( with intensive exercise ) in terms of teaching and controlling the kinematic compatibility of the movements of the parts of the body walking, and accordingly the recommendations came in the necessities of adopting exercises for the distributed method in teaching young beginners to the movements of athletic walking and controlling their compatibility

ZnO nanoparticles and carboxylated MWNTs multi-networks composite hydrogels with piezoelectric properties and human motion sensing

Piezoelectric composite hydrogels have been developed as interfaces connecting biological organs and electronic devices owing to their flexibility, biocompatibility, and electromechanical behavior, which enable the conversion of environmental stimuli into electronic signals. This study presents a multifunctional hydrogel that is soft, deformable, conductive, and piezoelectric. Using water as solvent and ZnO carbon nanotube (CNT) modified polyvinyl alcohol/agar/tannin as active ingredient, a one-pot green solution mixing method was used to prepare piezoelectric hydrogel with multi-network structure. The T5C5Z4 composite hydrogel designed in this paper has excellent performance in the sensing test, and can also clearly and accurately generate signals for slight movements of body parts. The T5C5Z4 composite hydrogel also has stable piezoelectric performance. In this paper designs a 100 g ball with a radius of 10 mm that falls freely from different heights and contacts with composite water (6 cm*3 cm*4 mm) to output different electrical signals, and the output voltage also increases with the height with increasing. The composite hydrogel has also been demonstrated as a sensing-detectable, piezoelectrically stimulated flexible bioelectronic materials.