Biomechanical data provide fundamental information about changes in musculoskeletal function during development, adaptation, and disease. To facilitate the study of mouse locomotor biomechanics, we modified a standard mouse running wheel to include a force-sensitive rung capable of measuring the normal and tangential forces applied by individual paws. Force data were collected throughout the ni...

Tactile roughness magnitude estimates increase with contact force. However, it is not known whether discrimination thresholds are affected by contact force and other parameters, such as duration and tangential movement. The effects of these factors on roughness discrimination thresholds were determined using an adaptive staircase procedure for coarse and fine texture discrimination during activ...

When grasping and manipulating objects, the central controller utilizes the mechanical advantage of the normal forces of the fingers for torque production. Whether the same is valid for tangential forces is unknown. The main purpose of this study was to determine the patterns of finger tangential forces and the use of mechanical advantage as a control mechanism when dealing with objects of nonu...

This article proposes a technique to calculate the coefficient of friction for the fingertip- object interface. Twelve subjects (6 males and 6 females) participated in two experiments. During the first experiment (the imposed displacement method), a 3-D force sensor was moved horizontally while the subjects applied a specified normal force (4 N, 8 N, 12 N) on the surface of a sensor covered wit...

In the current article, a combination of the differential transform method (DTM) and Padé approximation method are implemented to solve a system of nonlinear differential equations modelling the flow of a Newtonian magnetic lubricant squeeze film with magnetic induction effects incorporated. Solutions for the transformed radial and tangential momentum as well as solutions for the radial and tan...

An important theoretical concept in motor control is the idea that the CNS uses an internal model of the motor system and environment to predict the sensory consequences of motor commands. In arm movement control, a critical factor affecting the transformation from motor commands to sensory consequences is limb dynamics, including the inertial anisotropy of the arm, which refers to the fact tha...

A soft tactile sensor able to detect both normal and tangential forces is fabricated with a simple method using conductive textile. Owing to the multi-layered architecture, the capacitive-based tactile sensor is highly sensitive (less than 10 mg and 8 μm, for minimal detectable weight and displacement, respectively) within a wide normal force range (potentially up to 27 N (400 kPa)) and natural...

Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based pattern recognition is employed to predict the locations of dark matter halos within simulated galaxy distributions. Local maxima in the net tangential force produced by galaxy positions and ellipticities forms a feature space upon which PCA is performed to distinguish halo from non-halo maxima. Within a dimensionally reduced space large halo types are s...