Spinocerebellar ataxia 38 (SCA 38) is a rare autosomal neurological disease whose clinical features include, among others, severe gait disturbances that have not yet been fully characterized. In this study, we employed computerized 3D analysis to obtain spatio-temporal parameters of and the kinematics in sagittal plane hip, knee, ankle joints seven individuals with SCA 38, which were then compa...

For most of our history, we predominantly ran barefoot or in minimalist shoes. The advent of modern footwear, however, might have introduced alterations in the motor control of running. The present study investigated shod and barefoot running under the perspective of the modular organization of muscle activation, in order to help addressing the neurophysiological factors underlying human locomo...

Generally, bipolar transistors have better performance than MOS transistors if higher transconductances for the same operating point or higher transition frequencies are required. On the other hand, compared to MOS transistors, bipolar transistors often have limited use in the design of VCO’s, due to a limited voltage swing across the resonator and therefore limited phase-noise performance. How...

[Purpose] The present study investigated the effects of gait speed on temporal and spatial gait characteristics of hemiplegic stroke patients. [Subjects and Methods] Twenty post-stroke hemiplegic patients participated in the present study. To enhance the reliability of the analysis of the gait characteristics, the assessments were conducted three days per week at the same time every day. Each s...

[Purpose] The aim of this study was to determine the effect of stair task training on gait abilities by conducting stair task training. In this training, step training is applied in various directions with hemiplegia patients. [Subjects and Methods] Thirty-six patients with stroke were selected on the basis of inclusion and exclusion criteria, and they were randomly divided into eighteen patien...

This paper presents the design and analysis of high speed, high gain and fully differential operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) implemented in 65-nm digital CMOS process. The OTA, which employ a folded-cascode topology with gain boosting technique, has rail-to-rail input swing and large output swing. The result shows the DC gain of 82 dB and a unity-gain frequency of 477MHz with phase ...

Effective training to improve serve speed is important for competitive tennis players. The purposes of this study were to investigate the effects of anthropometric factors and whole body kinematics of elite players on ball speed and to propose possible training strategies for improving the quality of tennis serves. Body and racket kinematics of tennis serves of 12 male elite Hong Kong players w...

Analytic techniques for predicting onset of voltage collapse in power systems often rely upon identification of a saddle node bifurcation. While many authors acknowledge that the separation between voltage phenomena and phase angle phenomena is far from absolute, most recent works have viewed voltage variation as the more significant problem. The goal of the work presented here is to shift focu...

We proposed a fuzzy control scheme to implement the cycle-to-cycle control for restoring swing phase of gait using functional electrical stimulation (FES). We designed two fuzzy controllers for the biceps femoris short head (BFS) and the vastus muscles to control flexion and extension of the knee joint during the swing phase. Control capabilities of the designed fuzzy controllers were tested an...

Presynaptic inhibition is a powerful mechanism for selectively and dynamically gating sensory inputs entering the spinal cord. We investigated how hindlimb mechanics influence presynaptic inhibition during locomotion using pioneering approaches in an in vitro spinal cord-hindlimb preparation. We recorded lumbar dorsal root potentials to measure primary afferent depolarization-mediated presynapt...