BACKGROUND Older adults often experience limited mobility, lower extremity muscle weakness, and increased fall risk. Furthermore, when older adults perform tasks that require control of submaximal force, impairments in their ability to maintain steady and accurate force output have been reported. Such problems may be related to deteriorating levels of mobility, particularly in older adults who ...

Under linearly polarized illumination, a well-designed elliptical nanohole concurrently offers chiral near field and enantioselective optical trapping force to attract/repel the target.

The hunger strike is a strange technique of civil war. Physical suffering—possibly even death—is inflicted on oneself, rather than on the opponent. The technique can be conceived as a paradoxical inversion of hostage-taking or kidnapping, analyzed by Elster (2004). With kidnapping, A threatens to kill a victim B in order to force concessions from the target C; sometimes the victim is also the t...

When cellular contractile forces are central to pathophysiology, these forces comprise a logical target of therapy. Nevertheless, existing high-throughput screens are limited to upstream signalling intermediates with poorly defined relationships to such a physiological endpoint. Using cellular force as the target, here we report a new screening technology and demonstrate its applications using ...

Brain dysfunction in the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and/or basal ganglia causes serious movement disorders such as cerebellar ataxia, Parkinson disease and so on. Compensation of hand movement by adding an external force will recover the motor function and will be helpful for improving the quality of patients’ daily life. This paper proposes a method for compensating human hand movement on vis...

Only a few guidelines exist for defining the force properties in a haptic interface; as a consequence, they are mostly determined in an ad-hoc manner. We investigate how the user's performance changes during target acquisition when increasing force amplitudes are applied. Using a simple multidirectional point-select task, forces with variable amplitudes are applied to the user while traversing ...

The main focus of our research is to control the load of selected muscles by using a power-assisting device, thus enabling more effective motion support, rehabilitation and training by explicitly specifying the target muscles. In our past research, a control method was proposed for static human motion. The results of simulation and experiments showed that it is possible to control the force of ...

We have measured three axial polarization observables in d-->p--> breakup with a polarized 270 MeV deuteron beam on a polarized proton target. Axial observables are zero by parity conservation in elastic scattering but can be easily observed in the breakup channel at the present energy. Based on a symmetry argument, the sensitivity of these observables to the three-nucleon force might be enhanc...

The transition of cell-matrix adhesions from the initial punctate focal complexes into the mature elongated form, known as focal contacts, requires GTPase Rho activity. In particular, activation of myosin II-driven contractility by a Rho target known as Rho-associated kinase (ROCK) was shown to be essential for focal contact formation. To dissect the mechanism of Rho-dependent induction of foca...

Fast isometric elbow flexor muscle contractions of specified amplitude in six normal subjects were compared with those of 11 patients with Parkinson's disease. Despite treatment, all patients exhibited deficits in this motor task. Three patients were able to produce rapid force pulses with normal contraction times, but the variability of their force responses was increased in comparison with th...