1,720,955 research outputs found
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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Biomechanical Transmission as a Channel for Touch Information in Human Tactile Sensing
Full text linkThe sense of touch arises from a complex interplay between biomechanical and neural processes that span large areas of skin. Little is understood about these processes and their interactions beyond the immediate area of touch contact due to experimental constraints on biomechanical and neural measurements. This Ph.D. dissertation addresses these challenges by developing data-driven computational methods to predict and analyze the widespread neuromechanical processes underlying manual touch. The research presented here seeks to answer the following questions: How does biomechanical transmission influence neural signals in the human tactile system, and what implications does that have for human tactile sensing in general? And how can we exploit biomechanical transmission for technology that interfaces with or takes inspiration from the human sense of touch? This dissertation builds upon findings that manual touch interactions biomechanically transmit skin oscillations across the hand and arm (biomechanical transmission), exciting widespread mechanoreceptive sensory neurons (mechanoreceptors). Chapter 3 uses high-resolution optical vibrometry measurements of whole-hand skin oscillations to drive neural simulations of mechanoreceptor populations. The results demonstrate that the hand's biomechanics modifies skin oscillations in a frequency- and location-dependent manner that diversifies mechanoreceptor responses, enabling them to efficiently capture touch information. This research challenges existing characterizations of peripheral tactile sensing and has implications for how tactile information is processed by the brain. Critically, this chapter emphasizes the importance of considering the influence of biomechanics on neural signals both at and beyond the location of touch contact. Motivated by research conveying the significance of studying neural circuitry in natural settings, Chapter 4 extends the data-driven methodology presented in Chapter 3 to investigate whole-hand tactile encoding of active, unconstrained touch interactions. The results indicate that information about these interactions is organized within the spatial structure of the population responses at the level of individual digits. Additionally, this work demonstrates that biomechanical transmission enables mechanoreceptors in areas far from locations of touch contact to capture significant tactile information. This concept of remote tactile sensing underpins the wrist-worn device developed in Chapter 5, which utilizes accelerometers to measure skin oscillations elicited by tactile sign language (TSL) letters performed on the hand. By extracting various temporal, spectral, and spectrotemporal features from these measurements and passing them into simple classifiers, the device achieves a translation accuracy of 94%. This chapter presents the first digital input device for TSL users, enabling digital TSL transcription and communication by leveraging biomechanical transmission. High-resolution measurements of skin oscillations, such as those employed in this dissertation, are often time- and resource-intensive. This presents an obstacle for touch research, given the demonstrated impact of biomechanical transmission on tactile sensing. To overcome these barriers, Chapter 6 introduces a free-to-use toolbox for predicting skin oscillations across the upper limb elicited by tactile stimuli applied at one or more locations on the hand. This toolbox enables the computational analysis of biomechanical transmission in the skin, reducing the need for physical measurements and supporting applications in neuroscience and haptics
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
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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