1,720,964 research outputs found
Motor stability evaluation in elderly subjects through instrumental stability measures and clinical rating scales
No full textMain topics: Experimental studies in human movement science; Movement deviation indexes
Introduction and aim: Falls in the elderly represent a major community and public health problem, with large clinical and economic consequences [1]. The understanding of locomotor stability is a critical issue in clinical assessment procedures. Clinicians typically use clinical rating scales of motor function tests for fall risk assessment purposes. However, this approach highly relies on the clinician's subjective judgement [2]. Variability and stability measurements of stride time and trunk accelerations during gait resulted promising in the assessment of gait stability and fall risk in healthy elderly subjects [3] and could lead to a more reliable and objective quantification of motor function, potentially representing a valid and objective complement to clinical rating scales. For an effective exploitation in clinical practice, the association between stability measures and clinical scales has to be assessed. The aim of the present study is the assessment of the relationship between instrumental variability and stability measures based on trunk accelerations during gait and some widely used clinical rating scales.
Patients/materials and methods: Seventy community dwelling old adults (35 males and 35 females, 76 ± 7 years, 76 ± 13 kg, 168 ± 9 cm) participated in the study. Barthel Index (BI), Cumulative Illness Rating Scale (CIRS) and Mini-BESTest (MBT) were administered to subjects by the same operators. Due to time/location constraints, MBT was only administered to 39 subjects (19 males and 20 females, 76 ± 6 years, 77 ± 12 kg, 168 ± 8 cm). Subjects also performed an instrumented over-ground gait task (on a 100 m long road) wearing an IMU located on the trunk, at the height of the fifth lumbar vertebra. Eleven gait variability/stability measures were calculated on stride time and trunk acceleration data during gait, namely Standard Deviation (SD), Coefficient of Variation (CV), Nonstationary Index (NI), Inconsistency of Variance (IV), Poincaré Plots (PSD1/PSD2), Maximum Floquet Multipliers (maxFM), short/long-term Lyapunov exponents (sLE/lLE), Harmonic Ratio (HR), Index of Harmonicity (IH), Multiscale Entropy (MSE) and Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA). Each measure was calculated for anterior–posterior (AP), medio-lateral (ML) and vertical (V) acceleration directions. In order to assess the correlation between clinical parameters and variability/stability measures, log transformed measures were used as inputs for linear regression models.
Results: SD, CV, PSD1 and PSD2 showed negative correlation with BI and MBT. The only stability measure that correlated (positively) with MBT and BI was IH in the ML direction. CIRS correlated with MSE (ML and V directions), maxFM and lLE.
Discussion and conclusions: BI and MBT negatively correlated with stride time variability measures, meaning that a relationship exists between the deterioration of the overall motor functionality and the increase in stride time variability. BI and MBT were also found to be linked to the harmonicity of acceleration signal in the ML direction, confirming the importance of ML trunk oscillations during gait for functionality assessment. CIRS correlated with stability measures, in particular with MSE in ML and V directions, suggesting a link between cumulative illness and gait stability in elderly subjects. Moreover, MSE was previously found to be linked to fall history in elderly subjects, and should hence to be taken into consideration for gait stability assessment.
In conclusion, gait variability and stability measures showed promising correlation with clinical rating scales in the elderly population, and could be considered for complementing the standard clinical scores in the assessment of fall risk. A more reliable quantification of locomotor features could be obtained from instrumental measurements, allowing to avoid inter-operator differences
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Association between smartphone-based activity monitoring and traditional clinical assessment tools in community-dwelling older people
No full textSmartphones are used in the framework of the FARSEEING-InChianti study to gain information on activities of daily living and define objective physical activity profiles. In this study we aimed to investigate the association between mean and extreme values of physical activity and gait characteristics derived from daily living activities and well-established clinical tools. 171 older adults from the InChianti cohort study were recruited. Factor analysis was performed to extract the underlying structure of physical activity and gait features for both mean and extreme values. Outcomes of the smartphone-based home monitoring are associated with clinical assessments. Extreme values seem to be more informative than the mean values and are more closely related with clinical assessments
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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