The RoboHelper project aims at building an effective and user friendly communication interface for assistive robots that can help the elderly live independently at home. Such communication interface should incorporate multiple modalities of communication, since collaborative task-oriented human-human communication is inherently multimodal. Data was collected from twenty collaborative task-orien...

In this paper, results ofa new sand filter design were presented. The drawer compacted sand filter (DCSF) is a modified design for a sand filter in which the sand layer is broken down into several layers, each of which is 10 cm high and placed in a movable drawer separated by a 10 cm space. A lab-scale DCSF was designed and operated for 330 days fed by synthetic grey water. The response of draw...

Pain secondary to instability in total knee arthroplasty (TKA) has been shown to be major cause of early failure. In this study, we focused on the effect of instability in TKA on the proximal tibio-fibular joint (PTFJ). We used a robotics model to compare the biomechanics of the PTFJ in the native knee, an appropriately balanced TKA, and an unbalanced TKA. The tibia (n = 5) was mounted to a six...

BACKGROUND When surgical intervention is required for a grade 3 superficial medial collateral ligament (sMCL) tear, there is no consensus on the optimal surgical treatment. Anatomic augmented repairs and anatomic reconstructions for treatment of grade 3 sMCL tears have not been biomechanically validated or compared. HYPOTHESIS Anatomic sMCL augmented repairs and anatomic sMCL reconstruction t...

CONTEXT While most meniscal or ligamentous knee injuries heal with nonoperative treatments, a subset should be treated with arthroscopic or open surgery. OBJECTIVE To analyze the accuracy of the clinical examination for meniscal or ligamentous knee injuries. DATA SOURCES MEDLINE (1966-December 31, 2000) and HealthSTAR (1975-December 31, 2000) databases were searched for English-language art...

BACKGROUND Lateral ankle sprains (LAS) are among the most common sports- related injuries and the reinjury rate is very high. OBJECTIVES This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of some intrinsic risk factors among professional football and basketball players with or without history of acute or recurrent ankle sprain. PATIENTS AND METHODS One hundred and six professional football and bas...

In this work, we propose a goal-driven collaborative task that contains vision, language, and action in a virtual environment as its core components. Specifically, we develop a collaborative ‘Image Drawing’ game between two agents, called CoDraw. Our game is grounded in a virtual world that contains movable clip art objects. Two players, Teller and Drawer, are involved. The Teller sees an abstr...