1,720,976 research outputs found
Multi-cue haptic guidance through wearables for enhancing human ergonomics
Full text linkWearable haptic systems can be easily integrated with the human body and represent an effective solution for a natural and unobtrusive stimulus delivery. These characteristics can open interesting perspectives for different applications, such as haptic guidance for human ergonomics enhancement, e.g. during human-robot collaborative tasks in industrial scenarios, where the usage of the visual communication channel can be problematic. In this work, we propose a wearable multi-cue system that can be worn at the arm level on both the two upper limbs, which conveys both squeezing stimuli (provided by an armband haptic device) and vibration, to provide corrective feedback for posture balancing along the user's frontal and sagittal plane, respectively. We evaluated the effectiveness of our system in delivering directional information to control the user's center of pressure position on a balancing board. We compared the here proposed haptic guidance with visual guidance cues. Results show no statistically significant differences in terms of success rate and time for task completion for the two conditions. Furthermore, participants underwent through a Subjective Quantitative Evaluation and a NASA-TLX test, evaluating the wearable haptic system as intuitive and effective
Enhancing the localization of uterine leiomyomas through cutaneous softness rendering for robot-assisted surgical palpation application
Full text link—Integrating tactile feedback for lump localization in Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) represents an
open research issue, which is still far to be solved. Main reasons for this are related e.g. to the need for a transparent connection with the teleoperating console, and an intuitive decoding of the delivered information. In this work, we focus on the specific case of RMIS treatment of uterine leiomyomas or fibroids, where little has been done in haptics to improve the outcomes of roboticsenabled palpation tasks. In this paper, we propose the usage of a wearable haptic interface for softness rendering as a lump display. The device was integrated in a teleoperation architecture that simulates a robot-assisted surgical palpation task of leiomyomas. Our work moved from an ex-vivo sample characterization of uterine tissues to show the effectiveness of our interface in conveying meaningful softness information. We extensively tested our system with gynecologic surgeons in palpation tasks with silicone specimens, which replicated the characteristics of uterine tissues with embedded leyomiomas. Results show that our system enables a softness-based discrimination of the embedded fibroids comparable to the one that physicians would achieve using directly their fingers in palpation tasks. Furthermore, the feedback provided by the haptic interface was perceived as comfortable, intuitive, and highly useful for fibroid localization
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
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
Spatially Separating Haptic Guidance from Task Dynamics through Wearable Devices
Full text linkHaptic devices have a high potential for delivering tailored training to novices. These devices can simulate forces associated with real-world tasks, or provide guidance forces that convey task completion and learning strategies. It has been shown, however, that providing both task forces and guidance forces simultaneously through the same haptic interface can lead to novices depending on guidance, being unable to demonstrate skill transfer, or learning the wrong task altogether. This work presents a novel solution whereby task forces are relayed via a kinesthetic haptic interface, while guidance forces are spatially separated through a cutaneous skin stretch modality. We explore different methods of delivering cutaneous based guidance to subjects in a dynamic trajectory following task. We next compare cutaneous guidance to kinesthetic guidance, as is traditional to spatially separated assistance. We further investigate the role of placing cutaneous guidance ipsilateral versus contralateral to the task force device. The efficacies of each guidance condition are compared by examining subject error and movement smoothness. Results show that cutaneous guidance can be as effective as kinesthetic guidance, making it a practical and cost-effective alternative for spatially separated assistance
SkinSource: A Data-Driven Toolbox for Predicting Touch-Elicited Vibrations in the Upper Limb
Full text linkVibrations transmitted throughout the hand and arm during touch contact play a central role in haptic science and engineering but are challenging to model or experimentally characterize. Here, we present SkinSource, a data-driven toolbox for predicting skin vibrations across the upper limb in response to user-specified input forces. The toolbox leverages impulse response measurements that encode the physics of vibration transmission across the hands and arms of four participants and provides software tools for analyzing the predicted skin responses. We show that the SkinSource predictions closely match experimental measurements and confirm the underlying assumption of linear vibration transmission in the skin. We also demonstrate through several usage examples how SkinSource can act as a versatile computational platform for haptic research applications, such as characterizing vibrotactile transmission in the skin, engineering haptic interfaces, and investigating touch perception
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