CONTEXT Despite scientific uncertainties about effectiveness, wearing back belts in the hopes of preventing costly and disabling low back injury in employees is becoming common in the workplace. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of using back belts in reducing back injury claims and low back pain. DESIGN AND SETTING Prospective cohort study. From April 1996 through April 1998, we iden...

This study estimated the effectiveness of seat belts in reducing injuries and estimated the associated economic benefits using state of Kansas data. The estimation process included three stages. In the first stage, seat belt effectiveness in reducing injuries to motor vehicle occupants was estimated. Crash data from Kansas Accident Reporting System (KARS) database was used to accomplish this es...

The Sarcos Treadport is a locomotion interface comprised of a large tilting treadmill, an active mechanical tether, and a CAVElike visual display. This paper presents the design specifications for the second-generation Sarcos Treadport. INTRODUCTION There have been various approaches towards the design of locomotion interfaces, including powered pedaling devices (Brogan et al., 1998), programma...

More than 50% of Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients exhibit freezing of gait (FoG) characterized by a sudden and transient inability to initiate or continue walking (1). The pathophysiology of FoG is still unknown, particularly due to the difficulty in reproducing this symptom spontaneously in the laboratory, either in humans or in animal models (2, 3). A current hypothesis proposes that FoG cou...

WHAT IS THE BLACK BELT? WHERE IS THE BLACK BELT? T he Black Belt is a string of counties that stretches from east Texas, through the deep South, and up into eastern Virginia. It is the largest, poorest, most rural region in the country. While definitions vary, the region typically is considered to encompass upwards of 623 counties across 11 states, mostly rural, crossing several smaller regions...

Van Allen radiation belts are typically two zones of energetic particles encircling the Earth separated by the slot region. How the outer radiation belt electrons are accelerated to relativistic energies remains an unanswered question. Recent studies have presented compelling evidence for the local acceleration by very-low-frequency (VLF) chorus waves. However, there has been a competing theory...

AN ARTICLE by Belušič and Zupančič (1) described the construction of a finger pulse sensor using a singing greeting card beeper. We felt that this beeper made of piezoelectric material could be easily modified to function as a respiratory belt transducer to monitor respiratory movements. Commercially available respiratory belt transducers, such as Pneumotrace (http:// www.adinstruments.com/prod...

The Kuiper belt contains a vast number of objects in a flattened, ringlike volume beyond the orbit of Neptune. These objects are collisionally processed relics from the accretion disk of the Sun and, as such, they can reveal much about early conditions in the Solar system. At the cryogenic temperatures prevailing beyond Neptune, volatile ices have been able to survive since the formation epoch ...

The Kuiper Belt is a vast swarm of comets orbiting at the Solar System’s outer edge. This Belt is comprised of debris that was left over from the epoch of planet formation, and this swarm’s distribution of orbit elements preserves a record of events that had occurred when the Solar System was still quite young. Although the common goal of most dynamical studies of the Kuiper Belt is to decipher...

We have studied the piezoelectric potential output of a ZnO wire/belt functionalized with p-type oligomer (2,5-Bis(octanoxy)-1,4-bis(4-formyl phenylene vinylene) benzene) (OPV2) when it was deflected by an atomic force microscope (AFM) tip in contact mode. In comparison to the ZnO wire/belt without oligomer coating, an extra positive voltage peak was observed prior to the appearance of a negati...