The recently developed Spring Back Reflector has low stiffness in the deployed configuration. A general method of stiffening this type of reflector without changing its folding properties is presented. The stiffening is achieved by adding a conical skirt around the edge of the dish; this skirt snaps elastically when the dish is folded. The paper concludes that it is possible to design spring ba...

background and aims: elastomeric chains and niti coil springs are two major traction aids in orthodontic tooth movements. force degradation occurs over time in both groups, with higher percentages in elastic chains. the effects of environmental factors and some mouth rinses on this force decay have been previously studied. no study has been performed to evaluate the effect of current popular mo...

Tendon springs influence locomotor movements in many terrestrial animals, but their roles in locomotion through fluids as well as in small-bodied mammals are less clear. We measured muscle, tendon and joint mechanics in an elbow extensor of a small fruit bat during ascending flight. At the end of downstroke, the tendon was stretched by elbow flexion as the wing was folded. At the end of upstrok...

A number of studies and researches have been conducted on Virtual Surgery Planning. More specifically, topics on interactive virtual surgery using haptic device have been discussed in [1][2] and so on. Due to the nature of high demand in physical accuracy, many researchers adapted Finite Element Method(FEM) for the simulation. In this paper, I propose simplified massspring model for the interac...

Research on the biomechanics of animal and human locomotion provides insight into basic principles of locomotion and respective implications for construction and control. Nearly elastic operation of the leg is necessary to reproduce the basic dynamics in walking and running. Elastic leg operation can be modelled with a spring-mass model. This model can be used as a template with respect to both...

A pair of muscles powering the human joint in an antagonistic configuration exemplifies the main difference between standard industrial robots and biological motor systems. Since muscles have a natural stiffness that varies with the muscle activation level, the central nervous system (CNS) can generate stable equilibrium postures, towards which the arm is attracted, by properly regulating the a...

BACKGROUND Kinesio Taping® has been widely used in clinical practice. However, it is unknown whether this type of tape is more effective than placebo taping in patients with chronic lower back pain. OBJECTIVE To compare the effectiveness of Kinesio Taping® in patients with chronic non-specific low back pain against a placebo tape and a control group. METHOD This is a 3-arm, randomized contr...

We present a modified version of the nudged elastic band (NEB) algorithm to find minimum energy paths connecting two known configurations. show that replacing harmonic band-energy term with discretized Onsager–Machlup action leads NEB adaptive spring lengths automatically increase resolution path around saddle point potential surface. The method has same computational cost per optimization step...