Score For Task Research Articles

Effect of shoulder rotation, upper arm rotation and elbow flexion in a repetitive gripping task

To investigate the effects of upper limb postures on discomfort score for repetitive gripping task. Eighteen right handed male participants volunteered in the experimental investigations. The present study was divided into two experiments. A Full factorial design of 2 (Two shoulder rotation angles) × 3 (Three elbow flexion angles) × 3 (Three upper arm rotation angles) was used. The effect of postures on MVC grip strength, Grip endurance and on discomfort score, for a repetitive task at 150 N ± 5 N with exertions 15 per minute was recorded. In a supplementary experiment, the EMG recordings were also taken for validating the effect of elbow flexion angle. ANOVA showed that the main effects of postures were not significant on MVC grip, except elbow flexion (p < 0.001). The endurance time was also significant (p=0.0100) for elbow flexion and there was no effect of other postures. The second experiment showed that the effect of shoulder rotation, elbow flexion and forearm rotation was significant (p <0.001) on discomfort score. The EMG activity of the muscles also showed that FDP and ECRB muscles had maximum reduction in median frequencies of the EMG signals of the respective muscles at 45° elbow flexion angle. The main effects of elbow flexion angle, shoulder rotation and forearm rotation were significant on discomfort score for the repetitive gripping task of the present study.

Automatic extraction of relations between medical concepts in clinical texts

A supervised machine learning approach to discover relations between medical problems, treatments, and tests mentioned in electronic medical records. A single support vector machine classifier was used to identify relations between concepts and to assign their semantic type. Several resources such as Wikipedia, WordNet, General Inquirer, and a relation similarity metric inform the classifier. The techniques reported in this paper were evaluated in the 2010 i2b2 Challenge and obtained the highest F1 score for the relation extraction task. When gold standard data for concepts and assertions were available, F1 was 73.7, precision was 72.0, and recall was 75.3. F1 is defined as 2*Precision*Recall/(Precision+Recall). Alternatively, when concepts and assertions were discovered automatically, F1 was 48.4, precision was 57.6, and recall was 41.7. Although a rich set of features was developed for the classifiers presented in this paper, little knowledge mining was performed from medical ontologies such as those found in UMLS. Future studies should incorporate features extracted from such knowledge sources, which we expect to further improve the results. Moreover, each relation discovery was treated independently. Joint classification of relations may further improve the quality of results. Also, joint learning of the discovery of concepts, assertions, and relations may also improve the results of automatic relation extraction. Lexical and contextual features proved to be very important in relation extraction from medical texts. When they are not available to the classifier, the F1 score decreases by 3.7%. In addition, features based on similarity contribute to a decrease of 1.1% when they are not available.

Applying mathematics in real-life problems: A case study of two senior high schools in Ghana

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the extent to which senior high school students could apply mathematics in real life situations by examining the relationship between their performance on “routine” mathematical calculations and that on a “shortwriting” task related to the application of mathematics. It involved thirty boys and thirty girls from two Senior High Schools in Accra, the capital of Ghana in West Africa. All the sixty participants were in Form 1 (SHS1) at the time of the study. Data for the study was collected between June and August 2008 using tasks and interviews. Both qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques were used to analyse the data. The results of the study showed no significant gender differences in the students’ performance on both the routine and the short-writing tasks but showed marked differences between the students’ performance on the routine calculations and that on the short-writing task. The students’ mean score for the routine calculations was significantly higher than their mean score for the short-writing task as the difference between the two mean scores was statistically significant at the 0.1% level. Furthermore, there was a strong correlation between the students’ performance on the two different tasks. The implications of the results for the teaching and learning of mathematics are discussed.Keywords: problem-solving, application, routine, task-oriented

Challenging the brain: Exploring the link between effort and cortical activation

To better understand the contributions of effort on cortical activation associated with motor tasks, healthy participants with varying capacities for isolating the control of individual finger movements performed tasks consisting of a single concurrent abduction of all digits (Easy) and paired finger abduction with digits 2 and 3 abducted together concurrently with digits 4 and 5 (Hard). Brain activity was inferred from measurement using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Effort was measured physiologically using electrodermal responses (EDR) and subjectively using the Borg scale. On average, the Borg score for the Hard task was significantly higher ( p = 0.007) than for the Easy task (2.9 ± 1.1 vs. 1.4 ± 0.7, respectively). Similarly, the average normalized peak-to-peak amplitude of the EDR was significantly higher ( p = 0.002) for the Hard task than for the Easy task (20.4 ± 6.5% vs. 12.1 ± 4.9%, respectively). The Hard task produced increases in sensorimotor network activation, including supplementary motor area, premotor, sensorimotor and parietal cortices, cerebellum and thalamus. When the imaging data were subdivided based on Borg score, there was an increase in activation and involvement of additional areas, including extrastriate and prefrontal cortices. Subdividing the data based on EDR amplitude produced greater effects including activation of the premotor and parietal cortices. These results show that the effort required for task performance influences the interpretation of fMRI data. This work establishes understanding and methodology for advancing future studies of the link between effort and motor control, and may be clinically relevant to sensorimotor recovery from neurologic injury.

Use of the Perceive, Recall, Plan and Perform System of Task Analysis for persons with schizophrenia: A preliminary study

Task analysis that targets information processing skills is an essential tool to understanding difficulties encountered by people with schizophrenia in their daily activities. The purpose of this preliminary study was to explore the use of the Perceive, Recall, Plan and Perform (PRPP) System of Task Analysis for this clientele. The specific objectives were to describe information processing difficulties as measured by the PRPP and to examine preliminary evidence of construct validity and interrater reliability. In the first part of this study, 10 participants with schizophrenia living in the community were assessed using the PRPP during both a simple and a complex meal preparation task. Community functioning was measured using the Independent Living Skills Survey. In the second part, interrater reliability was appraised using three trained raters, who scored 15 participants preparing the complex meal preparation task. Analysis of performance demonstrates that people with schizophrenia have difficulties especially in the Perceive and Plan quadrants of the PRPP and are more challenged in the complex task. The PRPP total score for the complex task is strongly related to the community functioning score. Results indicate good interrater reliability for the PRPP total score and moderate interrater reliability for the quadrant scores. Despite the small sample size, results from this preliminary study support the use of the PRPP System of Task Analysis to further explore the impact cognitive deficits have on daily task performance and thus on community functioning in people with schizophrenia.

Multi-Relational Learning, Text Mining, and Semi-Supervised Learning for Functional Genomics

We focus on the problem of predicting functional properties of the proteins corresponding to genes in the yeast genome. Our goal is to study the effectiveness of approaches that utilize all data sources that are available in this problem setting, including relational data, abstracts of research papers, and unlabeled data. We investigate a propositionalization approach which uses relational gene interaction data. We study the benefit of text classification and information extraction for utilizing a collection of scientific abstracts. We study transduction and co-training for using unlabeled data. We report on both, positive and negative results on the investigated approaches. The studied tasks are KDD Cup tasks of 2001 and 2002. The solutions which we describe achieved the highest score for task 2 in 2001, the fourth rank for task 3 in 2001, the highest score for one of the two subtasks and the third place for the overall task 2 in 2002.

The division of attention between a primary tracking task and secondary tasks of pointing with a stylus or speaking in a simulated ship's-gunfire-control task

Abstract The effects of two alternative secondary-task configurations upon a primary tracking task were assessed experimentally. The primary task was a simulation of a ship's-gunfire-control task. The simulation featured a compensatory tracking task, incorporating the effects of ships' motion into the display. The secondary task involved either pointing (designating a location on the screen with a stylus) or speaking the co-ordinates of the location. All tasks were tested under single- and dual-task conditions. Speed and error scores were recorded for the secondary tasks; tracking error score for the primary task. The results showed: (i) simultaneous pointing with a stylus adversely and significantly affected tracking, (ii) simultaneous speaking degraded tracking only slightly and non-significantly, (iii) simultaneous tracking did not adversely affect either pointing or speaking and (iv) pointing took about half the time of speaking. The results are discussed with respect to their possible application to ...

Prediction of Complex Task Proficiency by Means of Component Responses

The present study evolved from previous work on the relationship between a complex motor skill and its components (1957a). The objective was the fractionation of total-task behavior into individual part skills and the examination of relations between the parts and the total. The analysis leads to the synthesis of the complex skill. That is, a combinational rule is produced where the criterion score for the total task is reconstructed by means of the scores on the parts. Previous successful combinational rules were based upon models of independent probabilities (Bilodeau & Bilodeau, 1954; Bilodeau, 1955) and of multivariate regression . (Bilodeau, 1957b). A third approach (Bilodeau, 1957a), and also the one used here, make use of geometric relationships between the total and part tasks. There are two general types of training situations for which the synthesis can be made. In one, S practices the parts separately and is later tested with the parts simultaneously. In the other practice mode, training is confined to the total task. In the present experiment the training alternated between part and total tasks. S's task was to crank using two hands (total task) or one hand (part-task R and part-task L). The purpose was to show that the scores taken when the hands worked separately could be used to predict the scores when the hands worked together within a 5% margin of error. The practice of the part and whole tasks continued over a period of 20 days in order to ensure the development of more than an ordinary amount of coordination. It will be shown that (a) the problem of synthesizing whole-task performance is much simpler for skilled Ss than for the unskilled, and that (b) the terms of the combinational rule are suggestive of the nature of the developing coordination. METHOD Subjects.--On the basis of a brief foretest, three male graduate srudents were selected from five volunteers. The three Ss were chosen so as to maximize between-subject variance. Ss were paid $1.00 per hour plus a bonus for best and second best performance. Apparatus.-The appararus was Model CMlOlB of the Standard Two-Hand Coordination Test, modified as previously described (1957a) to change the cask from simple pursuit to tracing. Turning the crank for the right hand clockwise (C) or