CEU Mass Mediator (CMM, http://ceumass.eps.uspceu.es) is an online tool that has evolved from a simple interface to query different metabolomic databases (CMM 1.0) to a tool that unifies the compounds from these databases and, using an expert system with knowledge about the experimental setup and the compounds properties, filters and scores the query results (CMM 2.0). Since this last major revision, CMM has continued to grow, expanding the knowledge base of its expert system and including new services to support researchers in the metabolite annotation and identification process. The information from external databases has been refreshed, and an in-house library with oxidized lipids not present in other sources has been added. This has increased the number of experimental metabolites up 332,665 and the number of predicted metabolites to 681,198. Furthermore, new taxonomy and ontology metadata have been included. CMM has expanded its functionalities with a service for the annotation of oxidized glycerophosphocholines, a service for spectral comparison from MS 2 data, and a spectral quality-assessment service to determine the reliability of a spectrum for compound identification purposes. To facilitate the collaboration and integration of CMM with external tools and metabolomic platforms, a RESTful API has been created, and it has already been integrated into the HMDB (Human Metabolome Database). This paper will present the novel functionalities incorporated into version 3.0 of CMM.
Neck injuries and the related pain have a high prevalence and represent an important health problem. To properly diagnose and treat them, practitioners need an accurate system for measuring Cervical Range Of Motion (CROM). This article describes the development and validation of an inexpensive, small (4 cm × 4 cm × 8 cm), light (< 200 g) and easy to use solution for measuring CROM using wearable inertial sensors. The proposed solution has been designed with the clinical practice in mind, after consulting with practitioners. It is composed of: (a) two wearable wireless MEMS-based inertial devices, (b) a recording and report generation software application and (c) a measurement protocol for assessing CROM. The solution provides accurate (none of our results is outside the ROM ranges when compared with previously published results based on an optical tracking device) and reliable measurements (ICC = 0.93 for interrater reliability when compared with an optical tracking device and ICC > 0.90 for test-retest reliability), surpassing the popular CROM instrument’s capabilities and precision. It also fulfills the needs for clinical practice attending to effectiveness, efficiency (4 min from setup to final report) and user’s satisfaction (as reported by practitioners). The solution has been certified for mass-production and use in medical environments.
Robotic exoskeletons that induce leg movement have proven effective for lower body rehabilitation, but current solutions offer limited gait patterns, lack stabilization, and do not properly stimulate the proprioceptive and balance systems (since the patient remains in place). Partial body weight support (PBWS) systems unload part of the patient’s body weight during rehabilitation, improving the locomotive capabilities and minimizing the muscular effort. HYBRID is a complete system that combines a 6DoF lower body exoskeleton (H1) with a PBWS system (REMOVI) to produce a solution apt for clinical practice that offers improves on existing devices, moves with the patient, offers a gait cycle extracted from the kinematic analysis of healthy users, records the session data, and can easily transfer the patient from a wheelchair to standing position. This system was developed with input from therapists, and its response times have been measured to ensure it works swiftly and without a perceptible delay.
Patients with upper limb disorders are limited in their activities of daily living and impose an important healthcare burden due to the repetitive rehabilitation they require. A way to reduce this burden is through home-based therapy using virtual reality solutions, since they are readily available, provide immersion, and enable accurate motion tracking, and custom applications can be developed for them. However, there is lack of guidelines for the design of effective VR rehabilitation applications in the literature, particularly for bimanual training. This work introduces a VR telerehabilitation system that uses off-the-shelf hardware, a real-time remote setup, and a bimanual training application that aims to improve upper extremity motor function. It is made of six activities and was evaluated by five physiotherapists specialised in (2) neuromotor disorders and (3) functional rehabilitation and occupational therapy. A descriptive analysis of the results obtained from the System Usability Scale test of the application and a collection of qualitative assessments of each game have been carried out. The application obtained a mean score of 86.25 (±8.96 SD) in the System Usability Scale, and the experts concluded that it accurately reproduces activities of daily living movements except for wrist and finger movements. They also offer a set of design guidelines.
The size and complexity of cloud environments make them prone to failures. The traditional approach to achieve a high dependability for these systems relies on constant monitoring. However, this method is purely reactive. A more proactive approach is provided by online failure prediction (OFP) techniques. In this paper, we describe a OFP system for private IaaS platforms, currently under development, that combines different types of data input, including monitoring information, event logs, and failure data. In addition, this system operates at both the physical and virtual planes of the cloud, taking into account the relationships between nodes and failure propagation mechanisms that are unique to cloud environments. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit Categories and Subject Descriptors
The purpose of this work is to study the gap between the research evidence and the clinical practice in the physical rehabilitation of people with cerebral palsy. A review process was performed to (1) identify physical therapies to improve postural control in children with cerebral palsy and (2) determine the scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of those therapies. A Likert-based survey addressing a total of 43 healthcare professionals involved in pediatric physical therapy departments in Spain was carried out. The discussion was mainly supported by studies of level I or II evidence (according to the Oxford scale). The search process yielded 50 studies reporting 16 therapies. A strong positive correlation between the most used treatments and elevated levels of satisfaction was found. Some well-known but not often used techniques, such as hippotherapy, were identified. The treatment with the highest degree of use and satisfaction—neurodevelopment therapy (Bobath)—and some emerging techniques, such as virtual reality, were also identified. The fact that there is a meaningful gap between clinical practice and the scientific evidence was confirmed. The identified gap brings a certain degree of controversy. While some classic and well-known therapies had poor levels of supporting evidence, other relatively new approaches showed promising results.
Abstract-The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective múltiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this article proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described, which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g. installation, service binding, update or configuration).The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to valídate the feasibility of this proposal.
This study evaluates and compares the suitability for child–computer interaction (CCI, the branch within human–computer interaction focused on interactive computer systems for children) of two devices: a standard computer mouse and the ENLAZA interface, a head mouse that measures the user’s head posture using an inertial sensor. A multidirectional pointing task was used to assess the motor performance and the users’ ability to learn such a task. The evaluation was based on the interpretation of the metrics derived from Fitts’ law. Ten children aged between 6 and 8 participated in this study. Participants performed a series of pre- and post-training tests for both input devices. After the experiments, data were analyzed and statistically compared. The results show that Fitts’ law can be used to detect changes in the learning process and assess the level of psychomotor development (by comparing the performance of adults and children). In addition, meaningful differences between the fine motor control (hand) and the gross motor control (head) were found by comparing the results of the interaction using the two devices. These findings suggest that Fitts’ law metrics offer a reliable and objective way of measuring the progress of physical training or therapy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.