Degrees Of Assistance Research Articles

Relationship Between Gross Motor Function and Nutritional Status in Children with Cerebral Palsy attending a Tertiary Children’s Hospital of Nepal

Introduction: Malnutrition is a common problem in children with cerebral palsy and their management outcome is not satisfactory unless we address their nutritional aspect. The present study aims to find the relationship between gross motor function and nutritional status in these children by comparing the proportion of stunting, wasting and under-weight between the various levels of gross motor function. Methods: Our study was across- sectional study conducted on 82 cases of cerebral palsy between one to five years of age visiting Kanti Children’s Hospital, Kathmandu, Nepal from May 2017 to September 2018. Their level of gross motor function was ascertained by applying the Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFCS) and anthropometry was done using standard methods. On the basis of their motor function, the children were divided into two categories: those with poorer motor function who had poor self-mobility even with assistance (GMFCS level 4 and 5) and those with better motor function who had self-mobility with various degrees of assistance (GMFCS level 1, 2 and 3). Wasting, stunting and under-weight were compared between the two categories and odds ratio with 95% confidence interval was estimated for malnutrition. Results: The children belonging to poorer motor function were more likely to be underweight (Odds ratio 3.41; CI 1.36-8.52; p-value 0.008) and stunted (Odds ratio 3.9; CI 1.47-10.53; p-value 0.048) than those with better motor function. Conclusions: Children with poorer motor function are more likely to develop malnutrition (Specially stunting) than those with better motor function indicating that chronic form of malnutrition is more common in these children.

Cooperative Walking Equipment for the Elderly

With the accelerated aging of our country and the increasing proportion of the elderly population, the health problems and quality of life of the elderly population in our country are receiving more and more attention from the society. Due to the aging of physiological function, the old people’s exercise ability is getting weaker and weaker, and the deterioration of exercise function causes various kinds of exercise difficulties, thus making the old people have different degrees of assistance needs in standing, walking and balancing. Based on this, we plan to design a walking aid device to maintain the walking function of the elderly. The device meets the walking requirements of the elderly through the coordination and cooperation of a multi-rod mechanism, a damping mechanism and a slider mechanism. Mainly to reduce the weight of the knee joint of the elderly, while assisting in regular exercise, exercise stimulates physiological activity and reduces physical decline. The device assists the elderly to walk and has three main functions of reducing joint load, increasing balance ability and assisting walking.

RADAR: automated task planning for proactive decision support

ABSTRACT Proactive Decision Support aims at improving the decision making experience of human decision-makers by enhancing the quality of the decisions and the ease of making them. Given that AI techniques are efficient in searching over a potentially large solution space (of decision) and finding good solutions, it can be used for human-in-the-loop scenarios such as disaster response that demand naturalistic decision making. A human decision-maker, in such scenarios, may experience high-cognitive overload leading to a loss of situational awareness. In this paper, we propose the use of automated task-planning techniques coupled with design principles laid out in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community for developing a proactive decision support system. To this extent, we highlight the capabilities of such a system RADAR and briefly, describe how automated planning techniques help us in providing the varying degrees of assistance. To evaluate the effectiveness of the different capabilities, we conduct ablation studies with human subjects on a synthetic environment for making an interactive plan of study. We found that planning techniques like plan validation and suggestions help to reduce planning time (objective metrics) and improves user satisfaction (subjective metrics) compared to expert human planners without any support.

Short-Term Human–Robot Interaction Adaptability in Real-World Environments

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in deploying robotic systems in public environments able to effectively interact with people. To properly work in the wild, such systems should be robust and be able to deal with complex and unpredictable events that seldom happen in controlled laboratory conditions. Moreover, having to deal with untrained users adds further complexity to the problem and makes the task of defining effective interactions especially difficult. In this work, a Cognitive System that relies on planning is extended with adaptive capabilities and embedded in a Tiago robot. The result is a system able to help a person to complete a predefined game by offering various degrees of assistance. The robot may decide to change the level of assistance depending on factors such as the state of the game or the user performance at a given time. We conducted two days of experiments during a public fair. We selected random users to interact with the robot and only for one time. We show that, despite the short-term nature of human–robot interactions, the robot can effectively adapt its way of providing help, leading to better user performances as compared to a robot not providing this degree of flexibility.

Psychological mechanisms of development of mathematical research abilities’ components in schoolchildren

The article deals with the problem of psychological mechanisms of development of students’ mathematical research abilities in the process of solving mathematical creative tasks. It is indicated on the growing role of mathematical knowledge in connection with the implementation of a new, broader approach to the social functions of the school. Therefore, the formation of creative, research thinking, high level of need for achievements of schoolchildren is, of course, an important task of modern education, in particular its intermediate level. In order to develop the flexibility of thinking, developed and proposed to students of the upper classes, three types of problems with gradually increasing complexity: analytical and synthetic problems, problems with different degrees of assistance, tasks of self-research orientation. The results of recent researches and publications on psychology of creative activity, specifics of the process of formation of mathematical abilities are analyzed. The definition of concepts of research abilities, research mathematical abilities is given. The relationship between research abilities and the development of the problem of creativity psychology has been established. It was created the methodology for the development of components of mathematical research abilities of pupils in the process of carrying out special classes, which was focused on the development of separate components of mathematical research abilities. It has been confirmed that specially organized training positively influenced the development of structural components of mathematical research abilities of senior pupils. It is indicated on certain differences in the definition of research abilities in psychological and pedagogical literature, in revealing the essence, structure of research abilities, which affects the absence of valid methods of their detection. This is precisely why we can explain the inadequate development of this problem in methodological, theoretical and practical plans. It is proved that the senior school age is the age of development of the pre-professional scientific orientation of the person, in particular research abilities. The research mathematical orientation of high school students is manifested in the ability to quickly and easily find original, non-standard ways of solving problems, to investigate problems for compatibility and sufficiency of data, to establish cause and effect patterns. It is confirmed that the role of the motivational-personal component of mathematical research abilities is increasing among the high school students, namely: the interest in mathematical thinking is increasing, the desire to learn new is growing, showing persistence, determination, commitment and so on.

An Automatic Patient-Adapted ECG Heartbeat Classifier Allowing Expert Assistance

In this paper, we present a patient-adaptable algorithm for ECG heartbeat classification, based on a previously developed automatic classifier and a clustering algorithm. Both classifier and clustering algorithms include features from the RR interval series and morphology descriptors calculated from the wavelet transform. Integrating the decisions of both classifiers, the presented algorithm can work either automatically or with several degrees of assistance. The algorithm was comprehensively evaluated in several ECG databases for comparison purposes. Even in the fully automatic mode, the algorithm slightly improved the performance figures of the original automatic classifier; just with less than two manually annotated heartbeats (MAHB) per recording, the algorithm obtained a mean improvement for all databases of 6.9% in accuracy A, of 6.5% in global sensitivity S and of 8.9% in global positive predictive value P(+). An assistance of just 12 MAHB per recording resulted in a mean improvement of 13.1% in A, of 13.9% in S, and of 36.1% in P(+). For the assisted mode, the algorithm outperformed other state-of-the-art classifiers with less expert annotation effort. The results presented in this paper represent an improvement in the field of automatic and patient-adaptable heartbeats classification, concluding that the performance of an automatic classifier can be improved with an efficient handling of the expert assistance.

Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Booker T. Washington and the Colored American Magazine

Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard:Revisiting Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Booker T. Washington and the Colored American Magazine Alisha R. Knight (bio) Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), author of Contending Forces (1900), was the most prolific black woman writer of her time. Her work with the Colored American Magazine had no small part in earning her this distinction, for she published three serialized novels and several short stories and editorial pieces in the magazine. She abruptly stopped editing and contributing to the magazine in 1904, however. Some literary historians have assumed she left because Booker T. Washington purchased the journal and replaced her with one of his allies, and they dismiss the end of her tenure there as merely a casualty of the Tuskegee Machine. Hopkins's contemporary, W.E.B. Du Bois, theorized, with little elaboration, that Hopkins "was not conciliatory enough" toward white readers.1 In his 1947 version of the publication's history, William Stanley Braithwaite, who worked directly with Hopkins as one of the Colored American Magazine's literary critics, chose not to comment on how readers responded to Hopkins's political ideas. Instead, he characterized Hopkins as a "temperamental editor" whose desire for "an independence of action in making selections, and a dignity in soliciting manuscripts of the best" caused "friction" in the magazine's work environment.2 Indeed, considering his first-hand experiences with the magazine, Braithwaite's account is surprisingly devoid of details pertaining to the challenges Hopkins faced as she maneuvered the periodical publication process. As a result, scholars continue to speculate why she left and under what circumstances.3 By revisiting the case, I will show how Hopkins's defiant nature (which has either been misread or overlooked) and her radical ideology about the role of literature in the early twentieth-century racial uplift movement constitute a subversive subtext in the [End Page 41] articles she wrote and the editorial decisions she made for the Colored American Magazine. Hopkins was more antagonistic towards Booker T. Washington and his supporters than previously believed. Unlike former approaches, which do not utilize primary sources, especially Hopkins's own voice, my analysis examines her private and public writings to solve the mystery of the disappearing journal editor.4 From 1900 to 1904, Hopkins was a dedicated contributor to the Colored American Magazine, and she rose to the rank of literary editor in May 1903. Hopkins was also a member of the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, the firm that published the magazine and her first novel, Contending Forces. In 1904 Hopkins helped found the Colored American League and worked to raise subscriptions and funding for the periodical. Despite Hopkins and the League's efforts to sustain the periodical, it was sold to Fred R. Moore in the spring of 1904. At the time, Moore was known to be one of Washington's allies who received various degrees of assistance from him. It was Washington who actually orchestrated the purchase of the magazine and moved it from Boston to New York.5 When the magazine was moved to New York, Hopkins was demoted from editor to assistant editor, and Moore was installed at the head of the publication. The November 1904 Publishers' Announcements states that Hopkins left the magazine because of poor health.6 The magazine's explanation for her departure is highly questionable, since her work appeared in a rival publication a month later. When Hopkins left the magazine in 1904, she attempted to continue her writing career by contributing the series "The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century" and the article "The New York Subway" to the Voice of the Negro. Later, in 1905, she established her own publishing venture, Pauline E. Hopkins and Company, and published A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants, with Epilogue. In 1916 she attempted to start another magazine, New Era, which unfortunately lasted only two issues. After this magazine failed, Hopkins retreated from public life and resumed her work as a stenographer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It appears that by the time Hopkins died on August 13, 1930, her important work as an...

Influence of inspiratory assistance on ventilatory control during moderate exercise.

In five healthy subjects, we studied the effects of controlled mechanical unloading of the respiratory system on ventilatory control during moderate exercise, utilizing a modified positive-pressure ventilator (IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. BME-33: 361-365, 1986). We were especially interested in whether isocapnia was maintained when a portion of the normal ventilatory response to constant-load cycling was subserved by the ventilator. The mechanical unloading was achieved by "assisting" airflow throughout inspiration in a constant proportion to instantaneous flow. Two modest degrees of assistance (A1 = 1.5 and A2 = 3.0 cmH2O X l-1 X s) were imposed. The assistance caused minute ventilation (VE) to increase immediately (inspiratory time shortening and tidal volume rising) and end-tidal PCO2 (PETCO2) to fall. Some 10-15 s later, inspiratory occlusion pressure (P100) decreased, and in the new steady-state VE and PETCO2 were virtually restored to their control exercise levels. The modest residual hyperventilation [delta PETCO2 = -0.9 Torr (A1) and -1.6 Torr (A2)], which was not significant statistically, contrasted markedly with the much larger increase predicted for VE had there been no compensatory reduction in ventilatory drive (as evidenced by the fall in P100). Consistent with earlier studies utilizing resistive loading (J. Appl. Physiol. 35: 361-366, 1973 and Acta Physiol. Scand. 120: 557-565, 1984), these observations suggest that ventilatory drive during moderate exercise is controlled to compensate for modest changes in respiratory-mechanical load, so that VE is preserved at a level appropriate to metabolic rate or nearly so.

Some Questions About Community Self-Surveys: When Amateurs Conduct Research

In this article I want to call attention to some of the problems that may arise when citizens are deeply involved in the conduct, that is, in the data-gathering processes of research. To be sure, for years many studies of the type classified as action-research have solicited the help and co-operation of the practitioners who presumably will utilize the research findings. But the responsibility for the direction of the investigation itself is quite clearly in the hands of the social scientist. I am concerned here, by contrast, with those projects where the research itself is conducted by non-professionals, with varying degrees of assistance from social scientists.1 The most commonly encountered example of such projects is the community self-survey. Arnold Rose has described it as follows:This survey fits the traditional pattern of surveys in content, but not in method. It is purely descriptive, and its only innovation is that the research is carried on by participant members of the community rather than by...