1,721,039 research outputs found
Development and validation of upper extremity kinematic movement analysis for people with stroke. Reaching and drinking from a glass.
No full textKinematic analysis is a powerful method for objective assessment of movement performance, and is increasingly employed as outcome measure after stroke. The number of studies investigating natural, goal-oriented daily tasks is however small. Likewise, little is known how the actual movement performance measured with kinematics is related to the traditional clinical assessment scales. Furthermore, only few studies investigated longitudinal changes and evaluated what these changes mean in context of an individual’s functioning after stroke.
The overall aim of this thesis was to develop a method of three-dimensional movement analysis for a purposeful upper extremity task “drinking from a glass” and to evaluate the cross-sectional and longitudinal validity of the kinematic measures in relation to impairments and activity limitations in people with motor deficits after stroke.
Methods: The studies reported in the current thesis included 29 healthy individuals and 82 individuals with stroke. A standardized test protocol for the drinking task was developed and its consistency was examined. A five camera optoelectronic motion capture system with passive markers was used to measure both temporal and spatial kinematic characteristics of movement performance. The clinical outcomes used in the different studies were: Fugl-Meyer Assessment for Upper Extremity, Action Research Arm Test and ABILHAND questionnaire. The construct and criterion validity was examined in subacute and chronic stages after stroke; the longitudinal change and responsiveness was evaluated during the first three months after stroke.
Results: The test protocol of the drinking task demonstrated a good consistency in test-retest. The explorative analysis of kinematic data revealed that the drinking task can be described with two major factors in people with stroke. One of them included predominantly measures of temporal nature (movement time, smoothness, velocity) and the other comprised primarily spatial movement pattern measures (joint angles, trunk displacement). Four kinematic measures: movement time, movement smoothness, angular velocity of the elbow and compensatory trunk displacement; demonstrated to be most effective in discriminating among individuals with moderate or mild impairment level after stroke and healthy persons. Subsequently, three kinematic measures: movement smoothness, movement time and trunk displacement emerged demonstrating strongest association with upper extremity activity capacity level after stroke, measured with Action Research Arm Test. Finally, all those three kinematic measures showed to be responsive for capturing improvements in upper extremity activity during the first three months after stroke.
Conclusions and clinical implications: Three kinematic measures of the drinking task: movement smoothness, movement time and trunk displacement; demonstrated to be valid and responsive measures for characterizing the upper extremity function and to capture an improvement over time after stroke. It can be concluded, that the test protocol of the drinking task as described in this thesis is feasible for clinical studies and provides objective, valid and clinically interpretable data of an individual’s actual movement performance during the drinking task. This knowledge facilitates both clinical and movement analysis research and can be valuable in the area of bioengineering when assessment methods for new technology based devices are developed
Kinematic analysis of the upper extremity after stroke - How far have we reached and what have we grasped?
No full textWhat has been gained from the recent advances in kinematic analysis of the upper extremity after stroke?
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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