BACKGROUND The finger-tapping test is a commonly employed quantitative assessment tool used to measure motor performance in the upper extremities. This task is a complex motion that is affected by external stimuli, mood and health status. The complexity of this task is difficult to explain with a single average intertap-interval value (time difference between successive tappings) which only pro...

OBJECTIVE The diagnosis of shunt malfunction can be challenging since neuroimaging results are not always correlated with clinical outcomes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a simple, minimally invasive cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) lumbar tapping test that predicts shunt under-drainage in hydrocephalus patients. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the clinical and radiol...

abstract background: hypertension in pregnancy is one of the prevalent disorders resulting in maternal death. the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of stretching exercise and walking on changes of blood pressure in nulliparous women during pregnancy. materials and methods: this was a quasi-experimental trial that consisted three groups of women who took part in pre- and post-tests...

In Paralympic Classification, tests of impaired coordination (e.g. reciprocal tapping tasks) are effort-dependent and therefore susceptible to Intentional Misrepresentation of Abilities (IM) deliberate exaggeration of impairment severity. The authors investigated whether reciprocal tapping tasks performed sub-maximally could be differentiated from tapping tasks performed with maximal voluntary ...

Behavioral synchronization between speech and finger tapping provides a novel approach to improving speech recognition accuracy. We combine a sequence of finger tapping timings recorded alongside an utterance using two distinct methods: in the first method, HMM state transition probabilities at the word boundaries are controlled by the timing of the finger tapping; in the second, the probabilit...

objectives: this study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a modified floor reaction ankle foot orthosis (frafo) design on gait performance in children with cerebral palsy. methods: eight children with cerebral palsy wore a modified frafo bilaterally for six weeks. motion analysis was used to assess the immediate effectiveness of the orthosis on improving gait and also following six w...

This paper presents the development and evaluation of a method for enabling quantitative and automatic scoring of alternating tapping performance of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Ten healthy elderly subjects and 95 patients in different clinical stages of PD have utilized a touch-pad handheld computer to perform alternate tapping tests in their home environments. First, a neurologist ...