[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of the rotational axis position of a reclining wheelchair's back support on fluctuations in the shear force applied to the buttocks while the back support is reclined. [Subjects] The subjects were 12 healthy adult men. [Methods] The shear force applied to the buttocks was measured using a force plate. This study used two diffe...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of sacral sitting in a wheelchair on contact pressure on the buttocks and back, and shear force on the ischial region. [Subjects and Methods] Twenty-six healthy adults assumed two postures while seated in a wheelchair: a basic sitting posture, and sacral sitting with the pelvis tilted posteriorly and the ischium slid forward b...

Abstract In this work, a back-propagation artificial neural network model was optimally developed based on 25 experimental datasets for predicting the energy loss percentage of natural rubber foam. The foam specimens were prepared in Banbury internal mixer at various conditions mixing temperature (40-80°C), rotor speed (40-80 rpm), and mastication time (1-5 min). Stress-strain loops analyzed by...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Pain is currently evaluated with "subjective" methods (eg, patient self-report). This study aimed to test whether fatigue indexes are able to accurately discriminate between subjects with and subjects without low back pain. SUBJECTS Sixty subjects separated into 2 groups--a group with low back pain (n=30) and a group without low back pain (n=30)--participated in this st...

1) Nihon University Graduate School of Dentistry, Tokyo, Japan 2) Department of Fixed Prosthodontics and Division of Advanced Dental Treatment, Dental Research Center, Nihon University School of Dentistry, Tokyo, Japan 3) Department of Fixed Prosthodontics, Nihon University School of Dentistry,Tokyo, Japan 4) Department of Oral Health Sciences and Division of Functional Morphology, Dental Resea...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effects of the system tilt and back recline angles on the biomechanics of wheelchair propulsion for a group of older, disabled patients. It was hypothesized that increasing both the system tilt and backrest recline angles would have a positive effect on the biomechanical efficiency of manual wheelchair propulsion. DESIGN Three kinetic variables were estimated duri...

The low back pain risks in a beef skinning operation at a high stand kill floor workstation was evaluated. The increases in compressive forces at lower back (L5/S1) between normal slump (back angle 25 degrees, measured in the sagittal plane) and severe (45 degrees ) and between normal slump and very severe (70 degrees ) bent back postures were 387 N or 28% and 616 N or 45%, respectively. The hi...

We consider the problem of estimating the covariance of a collection of vectors given extremely compressed measurements of each vector. We propose and study an estimator based on back-projections of these compressive samples. We show, via a distribution-free analysis, that by observing just a single compressive measurement of each vector one can consistently estimate the covariance matrix, in b...

Compressive sensing (CS) has recently emerged as a framework for efficiently capturing signals that are sparse or compressible in an appropriate basis. While often motivated as an alternative to Nyquist-rate sampling, there remains a gap between the discrete, finite-dimensional CS framework and the problem of acquiring a continuous-time signal. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by ex...

The 2011 Tohoku-Oki Earthquake is a typical subduction-zone earthquake and is the 4th largest earthquake after the beginning of instrumental observation of earthquakes in the 19th century. In fact, the 2011 Tohoku-Oki Earthquake displaced the northeast Japan island arc horizontally and vertically. The displacement largely changed the tectonic situation of the arc from compressive to tensile. Th...