Abstract Background: The measurement of hand grip strength has several clinical applications to evaluate chronic hand disability, response to treatment, and work capacity after hand injury. Methods: We measured hand grip strength of 41 adults and compared their maximum strength with radiographic indices. Results: There was a significant relationship between hand grip strength and carpal height...

The study of loading in the muscle is essential to better understanding the adaptation and plasticity of the muscle under pathologic or surgically-altered conditions. Muscle recruitment and muscle force are determined by the muscle's mechanical function as a joint mover and a joint stabilizer. The coordination of muscle contraction affects joint stability. However, the conditions of the joint p...

Computer-aided technology can decrease the difficulty associated with arthroscopic surgery. Unlike a larger incision that exposes the whole joint, a small arthroscopic incision limits the surgeon to view the joint only from the arthroscope. Our computer-aided system for hip arthroscopy addresses this loss of joint visibility by (1) tracking tool position with a linkage of encoders, and (2) indi...

In the following, M,M denote respectively the set of all products of matrices in M, and the set of all products of length t of matrices in M. This problem is closely related to the so called joint spectral subradius of a set of matrices, which is the smallest asymptotic rate of growth of any long product of matrices in the set, when the length of the product increases. For a survey on the joint...

BACKGROUND The mapping from muscle activation to joint torque production can be difficult to determine for the multi-articular muscles of the fingers. This relationship was examined in vivo as a function of posture in the index finger. METHODS Five healthy adults participated in an experiment in which the seven muscles of the index finger were sequentially electrically stimulated using intram...

This paper proposes an efficient joint secret key encryption-channel coding cryptosystem, based on regular Extended Difference Family Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Parity-Check codes. The key length of the proposed cryptosystem decreases up to 85 percent using a new efficient compression algorithm. Cryptanalytic methods show that the improved cryptosystem has a significant security advantage over Ra...

Extensive osseous adaptations of the lumbar spine, pelvis, hip and femur characterize the emergence of the human bipedal gait with its 'double extension' of the lumbar spine and hip. To accommodate lumbar lordosis, the pelvis was 'compacted', becoming wider and shorter, as compared with the non-human apes. The hip joint acquired a much more extended position, which can be seen in a broader evol...

Humans employ a high degree of redundancy in joint actuation, with different combinations of muscle and tendon action providing the same net joint torque. Both the resolution of these redundancies and the energetics of such systems depend on the dynamic properties of muscles and tendons, particularly their force-length relations. Current walking models that use stock parameters when simulating ...

We consider a polling system: a queueing system of N ≥ 1 queues with Poisson arrivals Q1, . . . , QN visited in a cyclic order (with or without switchover times) by a single server. For this system we derive the probability generating function Q(·) of the joint queue length distribution at an arbitrary epoch in a stationary cycle, under no assumptions on service disciplines. We also derive the ...

Rarity has important implications with respect to information technology (IT) resources, enabling firms to develop competitive advantage. We study the effect of firms’ possession of rare technology (IT) resources in the formation of alliances and its effect on firm performance. Using text-mining techniques, we measure the rarity of the 488 technology keywords present in a text corpus from 81,26...