of a thesis at the University of Miami. Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disease caused by a loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the basal ganglia. Primary motor deficits include resting tremor, bradykinesia, muscular rigidity, and postural instability. Most importantly, patients have difficulty both initiating movements and performing well-timed movements. This study explored the e...

The processing of time intervals is fundamental for sensorimotor and cognitive functions. Perceptual and motor timing are often performed concurrently (e.g., playing a musical instrument). Although previous studies have shown the influence of body movements on time perception, how we perceive self-produced time intervals has remained unclear. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the timing m...

It is easy to write and verify real-time specifications with existing languages and methods; one just represents time as an ordinary variable. The resulting specifications can be verified with ordinary model checkers. This basic idea and some less obvious details are explained with simple examples.

Simple Temporal Networks (STN) allow conjunctions of minimum and maximum distance constraints between pairs of temporal positions to be represented. This paper introduces an extension of STN called Time-dependent STN (TSTN), which covers temporal constraints for which the minimum and maximum distances required between two temporal positions x and y are not necessarily constant but may depend on...

Although neuronal synchronization has been shown to exist in primary motor cortex (MI), very little is known about its possible contribution to coding of movement. By using cross-correlation techniques from multi-neuron recordings in MI, we observed that activity of neurons commonly synchronized around the time of movement initiation. For some cell pairs, synchrony varied with direction in a ma...

Rehabilitation of children with unilateral cerebral palsy has been progressed and improved their body function and structure, activities and participation of these children dramatically and increased their quality of life. Despite this progress, we still need improvement of intervention that address and focus on whole body movement and function during daily activities to change the habitual and...

Action observation studies have investigated whether changing the speed of the observed movement affects the action observation network. There are two types of speed-changing conditions; one involves "changes in actual movement velocity," and the other is "manipulation of video speed." Previous studies have investigated the effects of these conditions separately, but to date, no study has direc...

The effects of neurodevelopmental treatment on reaching in children with spastic quadriplegia were studied using a method of analysis to quantify the qualitative term "smoothness." Hand position in three-dimensional space was recorded during a simple reaching task using the WATSMART (Waterloo Spatial Motion Analysis and Recording Technique) system in conjunction with videotaping. The number of ...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to investigate the coordination between posture and movement in pathological aging (frailty) in comparison with normal aging, with the hypothesis that in pathological aging, postural control evolves towards a more reactive mode for which the perturbation induced by the movement is not anticipated and leads to delayed and late postural adjustments. METHODS Eld...

Surgical robotic devices are rapidly achieving widespread use and acceptance. Despite the many benefits of robotic-assisted surgery, it is typical for robot-assisted procedures to take longer. This study investigates the effect of control:response ratio on simple movement time in surgical telerobotic tasks. Robot control interfaces offer "motion scaling" settings but, in practice, this feature ...