Natural Human Movements Research Articles

THE INFLUENCE OF ATHLETIC EXERCISES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRESCHOOL CHILDREN MOTOR ABILITIES

The bases of athletic exercises are natural human movements. Their use in the educational process will contribute to the child’s health comprehensive physical development and strengthening. Athletic exercises improve the skills of walking, running, jumping and other movements that the child needs in his future daily life. The integrated use of athletic exercises teaches the child to feel and control the capabilities of his own body and to enjoy it. Athletic exercises stimulate the activity of each child, taking into consideration his individual characteristics. The aim of the research is the development of motor qualities in the educational process of preschool children using various athletic exercises. The objectives of the research are to increase the motor and functional abilities of children with the help of general developing and special athletic exercises, developing strength, speed, endurance, agility, etc., using various athletic exercises, and instilling love and interest in athletics. We used the method of study, analysis, comparison and synthesis of scientific and methodological literature, pedagogical experiment, methods of empirical analysis (observation, demonstration, etc.) The experiment carried out indicates that athletic exercises have the most effective impact on the process of development of preschool children motor abilities. This confirms the peculiarity and necessity of the quantitative and qualitative use of athletic exercises in improving the physical development of the younger generation.

Bioinspired smooth neuromorphic control for robotic arms

Beyond providing accurate movements, achieving smooth motion trajectories is a long-standing goal of robotics control theory for arms aiming to replicate natural human movements. Drawing inspiration from biological agents, whose reaching control networks effortlessly give rise to smooth and precise movements, can simplify these control objectives for robot arms. Neuromorphic processors, which mimic the brain’s computational principles, are an ideal platform to approximate the accuracy and smoothness of biological controllers while maximizing their energy efficiency and robustness. However, the incompatibility of conventional control methods with neuromorphic hardware limits the computational efficiency and explainability of their existing adaptations. In contrast, the neuronal subnetworks underlying smooth and accurate reaching movements are effective, minimal, and inherently compatible with neuromorphic hardware. In this work, we emulate these networks with a biologically realistic spiking neural network for motor control on neuromorphic hardware. The proposed controller incorporates experimentally-identified short-term synaptic plasticity and specialized neurons that regulate sensory feedback gain to provide smooth and accurate joint control across a wide motion range. Concurrently, it preserves the minimal complexity of its biological counterpart and is directly deployable on Intel’s neuromorphic processor. Using the joint controller as a building block and inspired by joint coordination in human arms, we scaled up this approach to control real-world robot arms. The trajectories and smooth, bell-shaped velocity profiles of the resulting motions resembled those of humans, verifying the biological relevance of the controller. Notably, the method achieved state-of-the-art control performance while decreasing the motion jerk by 19% to improve motion smoothness. Overall, this work suggests that control solutions inspired by experimentally identified neuronal architectures can provide effective, neuromorphic-controlled robots.

Характеристика на хандбалната игра в университетския спорт

This article focuses on the development and implementation of a new vision for the development of physical education and sports in the Republic of Bulgaria. Both nationally and regionally, opportunities are expanded and conditions are created for a new national policy in the field of physical education and sports, tailored to the interests and preferences of the younger generation. Handball is a sport in the field of competence known as sports games, which is a mandatory element in the Ministry of Education and Science’s general education programme in Physical Education and Sports. Handball is popular all over the world. Its relatively quick mastery, based on natural human movements, favours its rapid popularization. The development of the game is also influenced by its dynamism and attractiveness due to the constantly changing actions in it. The technical implementation of motor actions in the play environment stimulate the creative and motor activity of students, as well as their initiative and entrepreneurial skills.

Nature and Mobility in Mark Twain’sRoughing It

AbstractThis article explores the overland journey section of Roughing It as a key component of his overall engagement with the natural environment and his employment of mobility in landscape descriptions. Twain’s interactions with nature as he presents them to readers are rarely static evocations of beauty or of the sublime. To the contrary, he is often keenly attentive to the complex interactions between the natural environment and human movements. Twain evokes the vitality of nature by emphasizing movement as its definitive characteristic. Although he comically asserts in the prefatory that Roughing It derives from “variegated vagabondizing,” the narrative suggests a more nuanced immersion into the American West built on the persistent desire to move.

Recent Advances in the Neural Control of Movements: Lessons for Functional Recovery.

We review the current views on the control and coordination of movements following the traditions set by Nikolai Bernstein. In particular, we focus on the theory of neural control of effectors - from motor units to individual muscles, to joints, limbs, and to the whole body - with spatial referent coordinates organized into a hierarchy with multiple few-to-many mappings. Further, we discuss synergies ensuring stability of natural human movements within the uncontrolled manifold hypothesis. Synergies are organized within the neural control hierarchy based on the principle of motor abundance. Movement disorders are discussed as consequences of an inability to use the whole range of changes in referent coordinates (as in spasticity) and an inability to ensure controlled stability of salient variables as reflected in indices of multi-element synergies and their adjustments in preparation to actions (as in brain disorders, including Parkinson's disease, multiple-system atrophy, and stroke). At the end of the review, we discuss possible implications of this theoretical approach to peripheral disorders and their rehabilitations using, as an example, osteoarthritis. In particular, "joint stiffening" is viewed as a maladaptive strategy, which can compromise stability of salient variables during walking.

A Single-Actuated, Cable-Driven, and Self-Contained Robotic Hand Designed for Adaptive Grasps

Developing a dexterous robotic hand that mimics natural human hand movements is challenging due to complicated hand anatomy. Such a practical design should address several requirements, which are often conflicting and force the designer to prioritize the main design characteristics for a given application. Therefore, in the existing designs the requirements are only partially satisfied, leading to complicated and bulky solutions. To address this gap, a novel single-actuated, cable-driven, and self-contained robotic hand is presented in this work. This five-fingered robotic hand supports 19 degrees of freedom (DOFs) and can perform a wide range of precision and power grasps. The external structure of fingers and the thumb is inspired by Pisa/IIT SoftHand, while major modifications are implemented to significantly decrease the number of parts and the effect of friction. The cable configuration is inspired by the tendon structure of the hand anatomy. Furthermore, a novel power transmission system is presented in this work. This mechanism addresses compactness and underactuation, while ensuring proper force distribution through the fingers and the thumb. Moreover, this power transmission system can achieve adaptive grasps of objects with unknown geometries, which significantly simplifies the sensory and control systems. A 3D-printed prototype of the proposed design is fabricated and its base functionality is evaluated through simulations and experiments.

Next-Generation Simulation—Integrating Extended Reality Technology Into Medical Education

In recent years, the advancement of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies including Virtual and Augmented reality (VR and AR respectively) has created new human-computer interfaces that come increasingly closer to replicating natural human movements, interactions, and experiences. In medicine, there is a need for tools that accelerate learning and enhance the realism of training as medical procedures and responsibilities become increasingly complex and time constraints are placed on trainee work. XR and other novel simulation technologies are now being adapted for medical education and are enabling further interactivity, immersion, and safety in medical training. In this review, we investigate efforts to adopt XR into medical education curriculums and simulation labs to help trainees enhance their understanding of anatomy, practice empathetic communication, rehearse clinical procedures, and refine surgical skills. Furthermore, we discuss the current state of the field of XR technology and highlight the advantages of using virtual immersive teaching tools considering the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we lay out a vision for the next generation of medical simulation labs using XR devices summarizing the best practices from our and others’ experiences.

Heterogeneous interventions reduce the spread of COVID-19 in simulations on real mobility data

Major interventions have been introduced worldwide to slow down the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Large scale lockdown of human movements are effective in reducing the spread, but they come at a cost of significantly limited societal functions. We show that natural human movements are statistically diverse, and the spread of the disease is significantly influenced by a small group of active individuals and gathering venues. We find that interventions focused on these most mobile individuals and popular venues reduce both the peak infection rate and the total infected population while retaining high social activity levels. These trends are seen consistently in simulations with real human mobility data of different scales, resolutions, and modalities from multiple cities across the world. The observation implies that compared to broad sweeping interventions, more heterogeneous strategies that are targeted based on the network effects in human mobility provide a better balance between pandemic control and regular social activities.

Adiabatic invariants drive rhythmic human motion in variable gravity.

Voluntary human movements are stereotyped. When modeled in the framework of classical mechanics they are expected to minimize cost functions that may include energy, a natural candidate from a physiological point of view also. In time-changing environments, however, energy is no longer conserved-regardless of frictional energy dissipation-and it is therefore not the preferred candidate for any cost function able to describe the subsequent changes in motor strategies. Adiabatic invariants are known to be relevant observables in such systems, although they still need to be investigated in human motor control. We fill this gap and show that the theory of adiabatic invariants provides an accurate description of how human participants modify a voluntary, rhythmic, one-dimensional motion of the forearm in response to variable gravity (from 1 to 3g). Our findings suggest that adiabatic invariants may reveal generic hidden constraints ruling human motion in time-changing gravity.

A Cross-Layer Approach for Wireless Body Area Networks

Research in wireless body area network (WBAN) has gained interest and has become an emerging health service application because of the potential for its use in continuous monitoring of human well-being. The natural human body movements and environmental interference impose difficulties on WBAN performance, such as operational lifetime and data delivery reliability. This work proposes a cross-layer approach, called CL, based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard to guarantee quality of service in terms of packet delivery and network lifetime. The proposed protocol is compared to the original standard and results suggest that CL outperforms when interference is the cause of packet delivery failures.

AJILE Movement Prediction: Multimodal Deep Learning for Natural Human Neural Recordings and Video

Developing useful interfaces between brains and machines is a grand challenge of neuroengineering. An effective interface has the capacity to not only interpret neural signals, but predict the intentions of the human to perform an action in the near future; prediction is made even more challenging outside well-controlled laboratory experiments. This paper describes our approach to detect and to predict natural human arm movements in the future, a key challenge in brain computer interfacing that has never before been attempted. We introduce the novel Annotated Joints in Long-term ECoG (AJILE) dataset; AJILE includes automatically annotated poses of 7 upper body joints for four human subjects over 670 total hours (more than 72 million frames), along with the corresponding simultaneously acquired intracranial neural recordings. The size and scope of AJILE greatly exceeds all previous datasets with movements and electrocorticography (ECoG), making it possible to take a deep learning approach to movement prediction. We propose a multimodal model that combines deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) blocks, leveraging both ECoG and video modalities. We demonstrate that our models are able to detect movements and predict future movements up to 800 msec before movement initiation. Further, our multimodal movement prediction models exhibit resilience to simulated ablation of input neural signals. We believe a multimodal approach to natural neural decoding that takes context into account is critical in advancing bioelectronic technologies and human neuroscience.

Velocity-curvature patterns limit human-robot physical interaction.

Physical human-robot collaboration is becoming more common, both in industrial and service robotics. Cooperative execution of a task requires intuitive and efficient interaction between both actors. For humans, this means being able to predict and adapt to robot movements. Given that natural human movement exhibits several robust features, we examined whether human-robot physical interaction is facilitated when these features are considered in robot control. The present study investigated how humans adapt to biological and non-biological velocity patterns in robot movements. Participants held the end-effector of a robot that traced an elliptic path with either biological (two-thirds power law) or non-biological velocity profiles. Participants were instructed to minimize the force applied on the robot end-effector. Results showed that the applied force was significantly lower when the robot moved with a biological velocity pattern. With extensive practice and enhanced feedback, participants were able to decrease their force when following a non-biological velocity pattern, but never reached forces below those obtained with the 2/3 power law profile. These results suggest that some robust features observed in natural human movements are also a strong preference in guided movements. Therefore, such features should be considered in human-robot physical collaboration.

Modern insights in physical rehabilitation of the consequences of cerebral blood fl ow acute disturbances at the late rehabilitation period

The results of the analysis of scientific and methodological literature on the problem of physical rehabilitation of post-stroke patients with impaired motor function at the late rehabilitation period – compensation and functional adaptation to the environment are displayed. It was found that neuroplasticity lies at the basis of both true recovery and compensation of functions that are impaired due to stroke. It is shown that in the activation of neuroplasticity mechanisms an important role belongs to kinesitherapy, in particular, as well as to certain methods and types of physical exercises, being as close as possible to the natural human movements.

Robotic Arm Control through Human Arm Movement Using Accelerometer

In today’s world there is an increasing need to create artificial arms for different inhuman situations where human interaction is difficult or impossible. Here we propose to build a robotic arm controlled by natural human arm movements whose data is acquired through the use of accelerometers. The development of this arm is based on a accelerometers, which will all be interfaced with the microcontroller. Finally, this prototype of the arm may be expected to overcome the problem such as placing or picking hazardous objects or nonhazardous objects that are far away from the user.

A preferred pattern of joint coordination during arm movements with redundant degrees of freedom.

Redundancy of degrees of freedom (DOFs) during natural human movements is a central problem of motor control research. This study tests a novel interpretation that during arm movements, the DOF redundancy is used to support a preferred, simplified joint control pattern that consists of rotating either the shoulder or elbow actively and the other (trailing) joint predominantly passively by interaction and gravitational torques. We previously revealed the preference for this control pattern during nonredundant horizontal arm movements. Here, we studied whether this preference persists during movements with redundant DOFs and the redundancy is used to enlarge the range of directions in which this control pattern can be utilized. A free-stroke drawing task was performed that involved production of series of horizontal center-out strokes in randomly selected directions. Two conditions were used, with the arm's joints unconstrained (U) and constrained (C) to the horizontal plane. In both conditions, directional preferences were revealed and the simplified control pattern was used in the preferred and not in nonpreferred directions. The directional preferences were weaker and the range of preferred directions was wider in the U condition, with higher percentage of strokes performed with the simplified control pattern. This advantage was related to the usage of additional DOFs. We discuss that the simplified pattern may represent a feedforward control strategy that reduces the challenge of joint coordination caused by signal-dependent noise during movement execution. The results suggest a possibility that the simplified pattern is used during the majority of natural, seemingly complex arm movements.

Global vertical mode vibrations due to human group rhythmic movement in a 39 story building structure

In this paper, the field vibration measurement tests have been conducted for investigating the exact causes of the abnormal vibration accident which occurred on last July 5, 2011 in TechnoMart, a 39 story steel building structure. The vertical accelerations of the building floors were measured under the 4D movie-theater operation and human rhythmic movements in a fitness center which were estimated as ones of the vibration sources. From field tests, it could be identified that the building has global vertical vibration mode of 2.7Hz natural frequency and human group rhythmic movements having frequency component mainly close to 2.7Hz in a fitness center caused the resonance of the vertical mode. Especially, the fact that the identified damping ratio of the vertical mode by observing the free vibration response after the human group excitation was just 0.3%, implies that response amplification could be so significant that only 23 people could excite the 39 story building having the total mass of 30 thousands of metric ton move globally up and down. Tuned mass damper (TMD) is being considered as a measure for keep this resonance by adding damping to the building. The TMD design results shows that the acceleration level resulting from the same human excitation can be reduced to one fourth of that of the building without TMD.

Análise da marcha no plano inclinado e declinado de adultas e idosas com diferentes volumes de atividades semanais

A marcha é um dos mais naturais movimentos humanos, porém com o envelhecimento, sua eficiência vai se reduzindo, principalmente durante a transposição de superfícies inclinadas, onde o risco de acidentes aumenta. OBJETIVO: Avaliar as diferenças do padrão da marcha de indivíduos idosos ativos (ATI) e sedentários (SED) em relação aos indivíduos adultos (ADU) durante a locomoção em um terreno inclinado (rampa). MÉTODOS: Quarenta e cinco indivíduos (15 ADU, 15 ATI e 15 SED) caminharam, subindo e descendo uma rampa com 10% de inclinação. A análise cinemática (Vicon MX-13) e cinética (Plataforma de Força AMTI) de variáveis relacionadas com a marcha foi realizada. RESULTADOS: Foram identificadas reduções na amplitude e potência do impulso ao redor do tornozelo dos indivíduos SED e ATI em comparação aos ADU durante a subida da rampa. Na descida, as principais diferenças entre o grupo ADU e os grupos SED e ATI foram com relação à velocidade de deslocamento, provavelmente por limitações musculares de ordem elástica, principalmente ao redor do quadril. CONCLUSÃO: Aparentemente, o nível de atividades físicas não influenciou a marcha dos SED e ATI; entretanto, uma limitação do IPAQ de conseguir classificar adequadamente diferentes níveis de atividades físicas pode ter influenciado o resultado. Futuros estudos longitudinais nos quais os indivíduos são submetidos a diferentes volumes de atividades físicas diárias são necessários para que os resultados aqui encontrados possam ser confirmados.

A framework for the analysis and synthesis of 3D dynamic human gait

SUMMARYA comprehensive framework for the analysis and synthesis of 3D human gait is presented. The framework consists of a realistic morphological representation of the human body involving 40 degrees of freedom and 17 body segments. Through the analysis of human gait, the joint reaction forces/moments can be estimated and parameters associated with postural stability can be quantified. The synthesis of 3D human gait is a complicated problem due to the synchronisation of a large number of joint variables. Herein, the framework is employed to reconstruct a dynamically balanced gait cycle and develop sets of reference trajectories that can be used for either the assessment of human mobility or the control of mechanical ambulatory systems. The gait cycle is divided into eight postural configurations based on particular gait events. Gait kinematic data is used to provide natural human movements. The balance stability analysis is performed with various ground reference points. The proposed reconstruction of the gait cycle requires two optimisation steps that minimise the error distance between evaluated and desired gait and balance constraints. The first step (quasi-static motion) is used to approximate the postural configurations to a region close to the second optimisation step target while preserving the natural movements of human gait. The second step (dynamic motion) considers a normal speed gait cycle and is solved using the spacetime constraint method and a global optimisation algorithm. An experimental validation of the generated reference trajectories is carried out by comparing the paths followed by 19 optical markers of a motion tracking system with the paths of the corresponding node points on the model.

The three-dimensional determination of internal loads in the lower extremity

A three-dimensional model of the lower limb containing 47 muscles was developed to study the differences between a two- and three-dimensional approach for determining internal loads, the role of the dynamic joint representation, and the behavior of different load-bearing criteria in walking and running. The problem of redundancy of the musculo-skeletal system was resolved by applying inverse dynamics and static optimization methods. Different hypothetical load-bearing capabilities of hinge, spherical and intermediate joint types for the knee and the ankle joints were tested. It was found that even almost planar movements such as walking and running are associated with significant three-dimensional intersegment moments, especially in the frontal plane. Thus, a two-dimensional approach may underestimate internal loads up to 60%. It is shown that pure hinge joints are inappropriate for modeling the dynamical joint function of the knee and ankle joints. A more flexible joint representation in combination with a squared muscle stress minimization criterion predicted a lot of synergistic as well as antagonistic muscle activation which was also found in the EMG patterns. The results indicate the importance of muscular joint stabilization in natural human movements. Compared to in vivo measurements it is speculated that the predicted force magnitudes are considerably overestimated due to error propagation and still insufficient anatomical models. Thus, increased efforts to improve further the reliability of internal load calculations should be made in the future.