Assessment of the influence of a stable trunk and the affected upper limb (dominant or non-dominant) on the parameters of the wrist and hand motor coordination, grip strength and muscle tension in patients in the subacute post-stroke stage compared to healthy subjects.

An observational study.

Stroke Rehabilitation Department.

Thirty-four subjects after ischemic cerebral stroke and control group-32 subjects without neurological deficits, age and body mass/ height matched were included.

The tone of the multifidus, transverse abdominal and supraspinatus muscles were assessed by Luna EMG device. A HandTutor device were used to measure motor coordination parameters (e.g., range of movement, frequency of movement), and a manual dynamometer for measuring the strength of a hand grip. Subjects were examined in two positions sitting without back support (non-stabilized) and lying with stabilization of the trunk and the upper limb.

Passive stabilization of the trunk and the upper extremity caused a significant improvement in motor coordination of the fingers (

 ˂ 0.001) and the wrist (

< 0.001) in patients after stroke. Improved motor coordination of the upper extremity was associated with an increased tone of the supraspinatus muscle.

Passive stabilization of the trunk and the upper limb improved the hand and wrist coordination in patients following a stroke. Placing patients in a supine position with the stability of the affected upper limb during rehabilitation exercises may help them to access latent movement patterns lost due to neurological impairment after a stroke.

Passive stabilization of the trunk and the upper limb improved the hand and wrist coordination in patients following a stroke. Placing patients in a supine position with the stability of the affected upper limb during rehabilitation exercises may help them to access latent movement patterns lost due to neurological impairment after a stroke.The narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) communication standard is gaining momentum within the big picture of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) owing to its capabilities of ensuring pervasive and wide coverage while limiting power consumption. Therefore, it turns out to be a valuable enabling technology within a considerable number of applications. Apart from traditional remote monitoring and data acquisition purposes where comparable Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) facilities have ruled for years, NB-IoT can potentially carve out space within specific alcoves in which low latency, low power, high data-rates and ubiquitous coverage are fundamentals requirements. Long term asset tracking definitely falls within such niches, and in particular NB-IoT can become a valuable alternative to be exploited by both replacing the conventional Global Position System (GPS) system, or supporting it. To this end, this paper proposes an innovative tracking system prototype for asset shipping which relies on two enabling technologies GPS and NB-IoT. While position transmission is always put into effect via NB-IoT, it can be fetched by resorting to both GPS (like a standard tracker) or NB-IoT (thus establishing a GPS-less method). Iclepertin As a result, two localization techniques are arranged the former one is preciser but energy hungrier, while the latter one is coarser but more low power. Such working principles were successfully tested on the field by means of two road tests in as much itineraries. Tests results are in agreement with the expectations underlying the two working principles since the finer one provides a more accurate tracking. In addition, a consumption analysis was also performed aiming at assessing the prototype lifetime. Finally, tests pursuing the assessment of the tracking error were carried out underling the fact that it strongly depends on the geographic deployment of NB-IoT towers.Managing the large volumes of IoT and M2M traffic requires the evaluation of the scalability and reliability for all the components in the end-to-end system. This includes connectivity, mobile network functions, and application or services receiving and processing the data from end devices. Firstly, this paper discusses the design of a containerized IoT and M2M application and the mechanisms for delivering automated scalability and high availability when deploying it in (1) the edge using balenaCloud; (2) the Amazon Web Services cloud with EC2 instances; and (3) the dedicated Amazon Web Services IoT service. The experiments showed that there are no significant differences between edge and cloud deployments regarding resource consumption. Secondly, the solutions for scaling the 4G/5G network functions and mobile backhaul that provide the connectivity between devices and IoT/M2M applications are analyzed. In this case, the scalability and high availability of the 4G/5G components are provided by Kubernetes. The experiments showed that our proposed scaling algorithm for network slicing managed with SDN guarantees the necessary radio and network resources for end-to-end high availability.Hedonic scale testing is a well-accepted methodology for assessing consumer perceptions but is compromised by variation in voluntary responses between cultures. Check-all-that-apply (CATA) methods using emotion terms or emojis and facial expression recognition (FER) are emerging as more powerful tools for consumer sensory testing as they may offer improved assessment of voluntary and involuntary responses, respectively. Therefore, this experiment compared traditional hedonic scale responses for overall liking to (1) CATA emotions, (2) CATA emojis and (3) FER. The experiment measured voluntary and involuntary responses from 62 participants of Asian (53%) versus Western (47%) origin, who consumed six divergent yogurt formulations (Greek, drinkable, soy, coconut, berry, cookies). The hedonic scales could discriminate between yogurt formulations but could not distinguish between responses across the cultural groups. Aversive responses to formulations were the easiest to characterize for all methods; the hedonic scale was the only method that could not characterize differences in cultural preferences, with CATA emojis displaying the highest level of discrimination. In conclusion, CATA methods, particularly the use of emojis, showed improved characterization of cross-cultural preferences of yogurt formulations compared to hedonic scales and FER.