Development of Sensorised Resistance Band for Objective Exercise Measurement: Activities Classification Trial.

Resistance bands are often used in resistance training programs for older adults. Despite their widespread use, there is a lack of objective assessment of the actual strength, speed and precision of the movements during these exercises. Therefore, this paper presents the development of a sensorised resistance-band and a preliminary trial of activities classification by using artificial intelligence. The results show that in the preliminary trial, the classification accuracy of 4 different activities reached over 96% using accelerometer data only. A future study will be based on the sensorised resistance band to quantify resistance band exercises objectively in elderly people.

Diagnosis and arthroscopic treatment of primary synovial chondromatosis of the shoulder.

Primary synovial chondromatosis of the shoulder is a rare condition. We present the case of a 24-year-old man with a 6-month history of right shoulder pain and decreased range of motion. Computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging findings led us to the diagnosis of synovial chondromatosis of the shoulder. Arthroscopy revealed loose bodies in the glenohumeral joint, the biceps tendon sheath, and the subscapularis recess. Active intrasynovial proliferation of the axillary pouch was noted. All loose bodies were removed arthroscopically, and partial synovectomy was performed. Histologic examination confirmed the diagnosis of primary synovial chondromatosis. We recommend arthroscopic treatment for synovial chondromatosis of the shoulder because of low morbidity and early functional return.

BioThreads: a novel VLIW-based chip multiprocessor for accelerating biomedical image processing applications.

We discuss BioThreads, a novel, configurable, extensible system-on-chip multiprocessor and its use in accelerating biomedical signal processing applications such as imaging photoplethysmography (IPPG). BioThreads is derived from the LE1 open-source VLIW chip multiprocessor and efficiently handles instruction, data and thread-level parallelism. In addition, it supports a novel mechanism for the dynamic creation, and allocation of software threads to uncommitted processor cores by implementing key POSIX Threads primitives directly in hardware, as custom instructions. In this study, the BioThreads core is used to accelerate the calculation of the oxygen saturation map of living tissue in an experimental setup consisting of a high speed image acquisition system, connected to an FPGA board and to a host system. Results demonstrate near-linear acceleration of the core kernels of the target blood perfusion assessment with increasing number of hardware threads. The BioThreads processor was implemented on both standard-cell and FPGA technologies; in the first case and for an issue width of two, full real-time performance is achieved with 4 cores whereas on a mid-range Xilinx Virtex6 device this is achieved with 10 dual-issue cores. An 8-core LE1 VLIW FPGA prototype of the system achieved 240 times faster execution time than the scalar Microblaze processor demonstrating the scalability of the proposed solution to a state-of-the-art FPGA vendor provided soft CPU core.

Innovation for personalization: a healthcare case study.

This paper describes a research and innovation platform for the development of ideas relating to the investigation of blood perfusion in peripheral tissue. The Loughborough Innovation Platform for Health Technologies (LIPHT) can be used to demonstrate the use of the research and innovation pipe-line in more than one dimension. For this paper the first dimension considered is that of 'blue sky' idea through to their exploitation for the benefit of users and at the same time creating a wealth stream; the second dimension is the changing market as the ideas develop--from a hospital-based instrument operated by clinicians through to a point and click device for the use by the knowledgeable layman in the community. The starting point for these developments is a medical device known to many people as the 'finger clip' that measures arterial blood oxygen saturation; the end point is an optical device capable of imaging blood perfusion.