Recent studies have shown that during unimanual motor tasks, aging adults show bilateral recruitment of primary motor cortex (M1), while younger adults show a suppression of the ipsilateral motor cortex. Additional work has indicated that increased bilateral M1 recruitment in older adults may be deleterious when performing some motor tasks. However, higher levels of physical fitness are associa...

Article history: Received 29 April 2015 Received in revised form 23 August 2015 Accepted 30 August 2015 Available online 14 September 2015 Snake-like flexible manipulators are widely used in minimally invasive surgery (MIS), which require adequate dexterity in confined workspace. Typically, the design mechanisms of these manipulators include tendon-driven mechanism and concentric tube mechanism...

[Purpose] There is a relationship between physical and cognitive functions; therefore, impairment of physical function would mean cognitive decline. This study aimed to investigate the association between change in physical and cognitive functions. [Subjects and Methods] Participants were 169 healthy community-dwelling older adults who attend the survey after three years from baseline (mean age...

Tasks that accurately measure dexterity in animal models are critical to understand hand function. Current rat behavioral tasks that measure dexterity largely use video analysis of reaching or food manipulation. While these tasks are easy to implement and are robust across disease models, they are subjective and laborious for the experimenter. Automating traditional tasks or creating new automa...

This paper demonstrates dexterity optimization of a three degrees of freedom (3 DOF) Delta manipulator. The parallel manipulator consists of three identical chains and is able to move on all three translational axes. In order to optimize the manipulator in term of dexterity, a floating point Genetic Algorithm (GA) global search method was applied. This algorithm intends to maximize the Global C...

BACKGROUND Transurethral Resection of Bladder Tumors (TURBT) is a challenging procedure partly due to resectoscope limitations. To date, manual resection performance has not been fully characterized. This work characterizes manual resection performance in the bladder while analyzing the effect of resection location on accuracy. METHODS Kinematic simulations are used to assess kinematic measur...

Manual ability (dexterity) and hand preference (handedness) are key features of human motor control. Recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies casted new light on the neural underpinnings of dexterity. In right-handers, MRI identified structural brain features related to the right–left difference in dexterity or skill acquisition. Functional MRI disclosed a hierarchical and modular repres...

Human non-hairy (glabrous) skin of the fingers, palms and soles wrinkles after prolonged exposure to water. Wrinkling is a sympathetic nervous system-dependent process but little is known about the physiology and potential functions of water-induced skin wrinkling. Here we investigated the idea that wrinkling might improve handling of wet objects by measuring the performance of a large cohort o...

Changes in hand morphology throughout human evolution have facilitated the use of forceful pad-to-pad precision grips, contributing to development fine motor movement and dexterous manipulation typical modern humans. Today, variation function may be affected by demographic and/or lifestyle factors, but these remain largely unexplored. We measured pinch grip strength dexterity a heterogeneous cr...

The link between visual-motor integration (VMI) and executive functions (EF) has been repeatedly documented in preschool children. VMI is often assessed using the Copy Design task measuring product, thereby neglecting processes that lead to a specific copy. Furthermore, EF are assumed be mainly involved when new. involvement of after minimal practice VMI, however, unknown. Therefore, present st...