Development of YOLOv5-Based Real-Time Smart Monitoring System for Increasing Lab Safety Awareness in Educational Institutions.

The term "smart lab" refers to a system that provides a novel and flexible approach to automating and connecting current laboratory processes. In education, laboratory safety is an essential component of undergraduate laboratory classes. The institution provides formal training for the students working in the labs that involve potential exposure to a wide range of hazards, including chemical, biological, and physical agents. During the laboratory safety lessons, the instructor explains the lab safety protocols and the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) to prevent unwanted accidents. However, it is not always guaranteed that students follow safety procedures throughout all lab sessions. Currently, the lab supervisors monitor the use of PPE, which is time consuming, laborious, and impossible to see each student. Consequently, students may unintentionally commit unrecognizable unsafe acts, which can lead to unwanted situations. Therefore, the aim of the research article was to propose a real-time smart vision-based lab-safety monitoring system to verify the PPE compliance of students, i.e., whether the student is wearing a mask, gloves, lab coat, and goggles, from image/video in real time. The YOLOv5 (YOLOv5l, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5n, YOLOv5s, and YOLOv5x) and YOLOv7 models were trained using a self-created novel dataset named SLS (Students Lab Safety). The dataset comprises four classes, namely, gloves, helmets, masks, and goggles, and 481 images, having a resolution of 835 × 1000, acquired from various research laboratories of the United Arab Emirates University. The performance of the different YOLOv5 and YOLOv7 versions is compared based on instances' size using evaluation metrics such as precision, F1 score, recall, and mAP (mean average precision). The experimental results demonstrated that all the models showed promising performance in detecting PPE in educational labs. The YOLOv5n approach achieved the highest mAP of 77.40% for small and large instances, followed by the YOLOv5m model having a mAP of 75.30%. A report detailing each student's PPE compliance in the lab can be prepared based on data collected in real time and stored in the proposed system. Overall, the proposed approach can be utilized to make laboratories smarter by enhancing the efficacy of safety in research settings; this, in turn, will aid the students in establishing a health and safety culture among students.

SHEL5K: An Extended Dataset and Benchmarking for Safety Helmet Detection.

Wearing a safety helmet is important in construction and manufacturing industrial activities to avoid unpleasant situations. This safety compliance can be ensured by developing an automatic helmet detection system using various computer vision and deep learning approaches. Developing a deep-learning-based helmet detection model usually requires an enormous amount of training data. However, there are very few public safety helmet datasets available in the literature, in which most of them are not entirely labeled, and the labeled one contains fewer classes. This paper presents the Safety HELmet dataset with 5K images (SHEL5K) dataset, an enhanced version of the SHD dataset. The proposed dataset consists of six completely labeled classes (helmet, head, head with helmet, person with helmet, person without helmet, and face). The proposed dataset was tested on multiple state-of-the-art object detection models, i.e., YOLOv3 (YOLOv3, YOLOv3-tiny, and YOLOv3-SPP), YOLOv4 (YOLOv4 and YOLOv4pacsp-x-mish), YOLOv5-P5 (YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, and YOLOv5x), the Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster-RCNN) with the Inception V2 architecture, and YOLOR. The experimental results from the various models on the proposed dataset were compared and showed improvement in the mean Average Precision (mAP). The SHEL5K dataset had an advantage over other safety helmet datasets as it contains fewer images with better labels and more classes, making helmet detection more accurate.

Technology, Privacy, and User Opinions of COVID-19 Mobile Apps for Contact Tracing: Systematic Search and Content Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Many countries across the globe have released their own COVID-19 contact tracing apps. This has resulted in the proliferation of several apps that used a variety of technologies. With the absence of a standardized approach used by the authorities, policy makers, and developers, many of these apps were unique. Therefore, they varied by function and the underlying technology used for contact tracing and infection reporting. OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to analyze most of the COVID-19 contact tracing apps in use today. Beyond investigating the privacy features, design, and implications of these apps, this research examined the underlying technologies used in contact tracing apps. It also attempted to provide some insights into their level of penetration and to gauge their public reception. This research also investigated the data collection, reporting, retention, and destruction procedures used by each of the apps under review. METHODS: This research study evaluated 13 apps corresponding to 10 countries based on the underlying technology used. The inclusion criteria ensured that most COVID-19-declared epicenters (ie, countries) were included in the sample, such as Italy. The evaluated apps also included countries that did relatively well in controlling the outbreak of COVID-19, such as Singapore. Informational and unofficial contact tracing apps were excluded from this study. A total of 30,000 reviews corresponding to the 13 apps were scraped from app store webpages and analyzed. RESULTS: This study identified seven distinct technologies used by COVID-19 tracing apps and 13 distinct apps. The United States was reported to have released the most contact tracing apps, followed by Italy. Bluetooth was the most frequently used underlying technology, employed by seven apps, whereas three apps used GPS. The Norwegian, Singaporean, Georgian, and New Zealand apps were among those that collected the most personal information from users, whereas some apps, such as the Swiss app and the Italian (Immuni) app, did not collect any user information. The observed minimum amount of time implemented for most of the apps with regard to data destruction was 14 days, while the Georgian app retained records for 3 years. No significant battery drainage issue was reported for most of the apps. Interestingly, only about 2% of the reviewers expressed concerns about their privacy across all apps. The number and frequency of technical issues reported on the Apple App Store were significantly more than those reported on Google Play; the highest was with the New Zealand app, with 27% of the reviewers reporting technical difficulties (ie, 10% out of 27% scraped reviews reported that the app did not work). The Norwegian, Swiss, and US (PathCheck) apps had the least reported technical issues, sitting at just below 10%. In terms of usability, many apps, such as those from Singapore, Australia, and Switzerland, did not provide the users with an option to sign out from their apps. CONCLUSIONS: This article highlighted the fact that COVID-19 contact tracing apps are still facing many obstacles toward their widespread and public acceptance. The main challenges are related to the technical, usability, and privacy issues or to the requirements reported by some users.

Towards Privacy-Preserved Aging in Place: A Systematic Review.

Owing to progressive population aging, elderly people (aged 65 and above) face challenges in carrying out activities of daily living, while placement of the elderly in a care facility is expensive and mentally taxing for them. Thus, there is a need to develop their own homes into smart homes using new technologies. However, this raises concerns of privacy and data security for users since it can be handled remotely. Hence, with advancing technologies it is important to overcome this challenge using privacy-preserving and non-intrusive models. For this review, 235 articles were scanned from databases, out of which 31 articles pertaining to in-home technologies that assist the elderly in living independently were shortlisted for inclusion. They described the adoption of various methodologies like different sensor-based mechanisms, wearables, camera-based techniques, robots, and machine learning strategies to provide a safe and comfortable environment to the elderly. Recent innovations have rendered these technologies more unobtrusive and privacy-preserving with increasing use of environmental sensors and less use of cameras and other devices that may compromise the privacy of individuals. There is a need to develop a comprehensive system for smart homes which ensures patient safety, privacy, and data security; in addition, robots should be integrated with the existing sensor-based platforms to assist in carrying out daily activities and therapies as required.

Performance Evaluation of Deep CNN-Based Crack Detection and Localization Techniques for Concrete Structures.

This paper proposes a customized convolutional neural network for crack detection in concrete structures. The proposed method is compared to four existing deep learning methods based on training data size, data heterogeneity, network complexity, and the number of epochs. The performance of the proposed convolutional neural network (CNN) model is evaluated and compared to pretrained networks, i.e., the VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet-50, and Inception V3 models, on eight datasets of different sizes, created from two public datasets. For each model, the evaluation considered computational time, crack localization results, and classification measures, e.g., accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Experimental results demonstrated that training data size and heterogeneity among data samples significantly affect model performance. All models demonstrated promising performance on a limited number of diverse training data; however, increasing the training data size and reducing diversity reduced generalization performance, and led to overfitting. The proposed customized CNN and VGG-16 models outperformed the other methods in terms of classification, localization, and computational time on a small amount of data, and the results indicate that these two models demonstrate superior crack detection and localization for concrete structures.

Binary Sensors-Based Privacy-Preserved Activity Recognition of Elderly Living Alone Using an RNN.

The recent growth of the elderly population has led to the requirement for constant home monitoring as solitary living becomes popular. This protects older people who live alone from unwanted instances such as falling or deterioration caused by some diseases. However, although wearable devices and camera-based systems can provide relatively precise information about human motion, they invade the privacy of the elderly. One way to detect the abnormal behavior of elderly residents under the condition of maintaining privacy is to equip the resident's house with an Internet of Things system based on a non-invasive binary motion sensor array. We propose to concatenate external features (previous activity and begin time-stamp) along with extracted features with a bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network to recognize the activities of daily living with a higher accuracy. The concatenated features are classified by a fully connected neural network (FCNN). The proposed model was evaluated on open dataset from the Center for Advanced Studies in Adaptive Systems (CASAS) at Washington State University. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art models with a margin of more than 6.25% of the F1 score on the same dataset.

Advances in neuroprosthetic management of foot drop: a review.

This paper reviews the technological advances and clinical results obtained in the neuroprosthetic management of foot drop. Functional electrical stimulation has been widely applied owing to its corrective abilities in patients suffering from a stroke, multiple sclerosis, or spinal cord injury among other pathologies. This review aims at identifying the progress made in this area over the last two decades, addressing two main questions: What is the status of neuroprosthetic technology in terms of architecture, sensorization, and control algorithms?. What is the current evidence on its functional and clinical efficacy? The results reveal the importance of systems capable of self-adjustment and the need for closed-loop control systems to adequately modulate assistance in individual conditions. Other advanced strategies, such as combining variable and constant frequency pulses, could also play an important role in reducing fatigue and obtaining better therapeutic results. The field not only would benefit from a deeper understanding of the kinematic, kinetic and neuromuscular implications and effects of more promising assistance strategies, but also there is a clear lack of long-term clinical studies addressing the therapeutic potential of these systems. This review paper provides an overview of current system design and control architectures choices with regard to their clinical effectiveness. Shortcomings and recommendations for future directions are identified.

Motor Control System for Adaptation of Healthy Individuals and Recovery of Poststroke Patients: A Case Study on Muscle Synergies.

Understanding the complex neuromuscular strategies underlying behavioral adaptation in healthy individuals and motor recovery after brain damage is essential for gaining fundamental knowledge on the motor control system. Relying on the concept of muscle synergy, which indicates the number of coordinated muscles needed to accomplish specific movements, we investigated behavioral adaptation in nine healthy participants who were introduced to a familiar environment and unfamiliar environment. We then compared the resulting computed muscle synergies with those observed in 10 moderate-stroke survivors throughout an 11-week motor recovery period. Our results revealed that computed muscle synergy characteristics changed after healthy participants were introduced to the unfamiliar environment, compared with those initially observed in the familiar environment, and exhibited an increased neural response to unpredictable inputs. The altered neural activities dramatically adjusted through behavior training to suit the unfamiliar environment requirements. Interestingly, we observed similar neuromuscular behaviors in patients with moderate stroke during the follow-up period of their motor recovery. This similarity suggests that the underlying neuromuscular strategies for adapting to an unfamiliar environment are comparable to those used for the recovery of motor function after stroke. Both mechanisms can be considered as a recall of neural pathways derived from preexisting muscle synergies, already encoded by the brain's internal model. Our results provide further insight on the fundamental principles of motor control and thus can guide the future development of poststroke therapies.

Muscle synergy stability and human balance maintenance.

BACKGROUND: The signals that the central nervous system (CNS) produces and sends to the muscles to effect movement are not entirely understood. Muscle synergy theory suggests that the central nervous system produces a small number of signals that pass through a network that distributes combinations of these signals to the muscles. Though these synergies are rather stable over time, some variability is present. METHODS: Here, we investigated the variability of muscle synergy and defined a synergy stability index (SSI) to quantify it. We measured the activity of muscles responsible for maintaining lateral balance in humans standing on a platform that was subjected to lateral disturbance from the platform. We then calculated muscle synergies attributed to postural reflex and automatic response by using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). Finally, from the calculated muscle synergies, we obtained SSI. RESULTS: We observed a positive proportional relation between balance performance and SSI. Participants who were adept at maintaining balance were found to have invariant muscle synergies, and non-adept participants showed variable muscle synergies. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that SSI can be used to quantitatively evaluate balance maintenance ability.

A pilot study of measuring emotional response and perception of LLM-generated questionnaire and human-generated questionnaires.

The advent of ChatGPT has sparked a heated debate surrounding natural language processing technology and AI-powered chatbots, leading to extensive research and applications across various disciplines. This pilot study aims to investigate the impact of ChatGPT on users' experiences by administering two distinct questionnaires, one generated by humans and the other by ChatGPT, along with an Emotion Detecting Model. A total of 14 participants (7 female and 7 male) aged between 18 and 35 years were recruited, resulting in the collection of 8672 ChatGPT-associated data points and 8797 human-associated data points. Data analysis was conducted using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The results indicate that the utilization of ChatGPT enhances participants' happiness levels and reduces their sadness levels. While no significant gender influences were observed, variations were found about specific emotions. It is important to note that the limited sample size, narrow age range, and potential cultural impacts restrict the generalizability of the findings to a broader population. Future research directions should explore the impact of incorporating additional language models or chatbots on user emotions, particularly among specific age groups such as older individuals and teenagers. As one of the pioneering works evaluating the human perception of ChatGPT text and communication, it is noteworthy that ChatGPT received positive evaluations and demonstrated effectiveness in generating extensive questionnaires.

On closed-loop brain stimulation systems for improving the quality of life of patients with neurological disorders.

Emerging brain technologies have significantly transformed human life in recent decades. For instance, the closed-loop brain-computer interface (BCI) is an advanced software-hardware system that interprets electrical signals from neurons, allowing communication with and control of the environment. The system then transmits these signals as controlled commands and provides feedback to the brain to execute specific tasks. This paper analyzes and presents the latest research on closed-loop BCI that utilizes electric/magnetic stimulation, optogenetic, and sonogenetic techniques. These techniques have demonstrated great potential in improving the quality of life for patients suffering from neurodegenerative or psychiatric diseases. We provide a comprehensive and systematic review of research on the modalities of closed-loop BCI in recent decades. To achieve this, the authors used a set of defined criteria to shortlist studies from well-known research databases into categories of brain stimulation techniques. These categories include deep brain stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation, transcranial direct-current stimulation, transcranial alternating-current stimulation, and optogenetics. These techniques have been useful in treating a wide range of disorders, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, dementia, and depression. In total, 76 studies were shortlisted and analyzed to illustrate how closed-loop BCI can considerably improve, enhance, and restore specific brain functions. The analysis revealed that literature in the area has not adequately covered closed-loop BCI in the context of cognitive neural prosthetics and implanted neural devices. However, the authors demonstrate that the applications of closed-loop BCI are highly beneficial, and the technology is continually evolving to improve the lives of individuals with various ailments, including those with sensory-motor issues or cognitive deficiencies. By utilizing emerging techniques of stimulation, closed-loop BCI can safely improve patients' cognitive and affective skills, resulting in better healthcare outcomes.

Robotic assistive and rehabilitation devices leading to motor recovery in upper limb: a systematic review.

PURPOSE: Stroke, spinal cord injury and other neuromuscular disorders lead to impairments in the human body. Upper limb impairments, especially hand impairments affect activities of daily living (ADL) and reduce the quality of life. The purpose of this review is to compare and evaluate the available robotic rehabilitation and assistive devices that can lead to motor recovery or maintain the current motor functional level. METHODS: A systematic review was conducted of the literature published in the years from 2016-2021, to focus on the most recent rehabilitation and assistive devices available in the market or research environments. RESULTS: A total of 230 studies published between 2016 and 2021 were identified from various databases. 107 were excluded with various reasons. Twenty-eight studies were taken into detailed review, to determine the efficacy of robotic devices in improving upper limb impairments or maintaining the current level from getting worse. CONCLUSION: It was concluded that with a good strategy and treatment plan; appropriate and regular use of these robotic rehabilitation and assistive devices do lead to improvements in current conditions of most of the subjects and prolonged use may lead to motor recovery.Implications for RehabilitationStroke, accidents, spinal cord injuries and other neuromuscular disorders lead to impairments. Upper limb impairments have a tremendous adverse affect on ADL and reduces quality of life drastically.Advancement in technology has led to the designing of many robotic assistive and rehabilitation devices to assist in motor recovery or aid in ADL.This review analyses different available devices for rehabilitation and assistance and points out that use of these devices in time does help in motor recovery. Most of the studies reviewed showed improvements for the user.Future devices should be more portable and easier to use from home.

PedaleoVR: Usability study of a virtual reality application for cycling exercise in patients with lower limb disorders and elderly people.

Achieving adherence to physical exercise training is essential in elders and adults with neurological disorders. Immersive technologies are seeing wide adoption among new neurorehabilitation therapies, as they provide a highly effective motivational and stimulating component. The aim of this study is to verify whether the developed virtual reality system for pedaling exercise is accepted and could be safety, useful and motivating for these populations. A feasibility study was conducted with patients with neuromotor disorders and elderly people from Lescer Clinic and the residential group Albertia, respectively. All the participants performed a pedaling exercise session with virtual reality platform. Then, the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, the System Usability Scale (SUS), Credibility and Expectancy Questionnaire, were assessed in the group of 20 adults (mean age = 61.1; standard deviation = 12.617, 15 males and 5 females) with lower limb disorders. While the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, Presence Questionnaire, Game user Experience Satisfaction Scale and SUS were assessed in the group of 18 elders (mean age = 85.16; standard deviation = 5.93, 5 males and 13 females). In light of the outcomes, PedaleoVR is considered to be a credible, usable and motivational tool towards adults with neuromotor disorders to perform cycling exercise, and therefore its usage could contribute to adherence to lower limb training activities. Moreover, PedaleoVR does not generate negative effects related to cybersickness while the sensation of presence and the degree of satisfaction generated have been positively evaluated by the geriatric population. This trial has been registered at ClinicalTrials.gov under the identifier: NCT05162040, Dec 2021.

An Observational Pilot Study of a Tailored Environmental Monitoring and Alert System for Improved Management of Chronic Respiratory Diseases.

Objective: Chronic lung-related diseases, with asthma being the most prominent example, characterized by diverse symptoms and triggers, present significant challenges in disease management and prediction of exacerbations across patients. This research aimed to devise a practical solution by introducing a personalized alert system tailored to individual lung function and environmental conditions, offering a holistic approach for the management of a range of chronic respiratory conditions. Methods: In response to these challenges, we developed a personalized alert system based on individual lung function tests conducted in diverse environmental conditions, as determined by air-quality sensors. Our research was substantiated through an observational pilot study involving twelve healthy participants. These participants were exposed to varying air quality, temperature, and humidity conditions, and their lung function, as indicated by peak expiratory flow (PEF) values, was monitored. Results: The study revealed pronounced variability in pulmonary responses across different environments. Leveraging these findings, we proposed a design of a personalized alarm system that monitors air quality in real-time and issues alerts under potentially unfavorable environmental conditions. Additionally, we investigated the use of basic machine learning techniques to predict PEF values in these varied environmental settings. Discussion: The proposed system offers a proactive approach for individuals, particularly those with asthma, to actively manage their respiratory health. By providing real-time monitoring and personalized alerts, it aims to minimize exposure to potential asthma triggers. Ultimately, our system seeks to empower individuals with the tools for timely intervention, potentially reducing discomfort and enhancing management of asthma symptoms.

Bidirectional parallel echo state network for speech emotion recognition.

Speech is an effective way for communicating and exchanging complex information between humans. Speech signal has involved a great attention in human-computer interaction. Therefore, emotion recognition from speech has become a hot research topic in the field of interacting machines with humans. In this paper, we proposed a novel speech emotion recognition system by adopting multivariate time series handcrafted feature representation from speech signals. Bidirectional echo state network with two parallel reservoir layers has been applied to capture additional independent information. The parallel reservoirs produce multiple representations for each direction from the bidirectional data with two stages of concatenation. The sparse random projection approach has been adopted to reduce the high-dimensional sparse output for each direction separately from both reservoirs. Random over-sampling and random under-sampling methods are used to overcome the imbalanced nature of the used speech emotion datasets. The performance of the proposed parallel ESN model is evaluated from the speaker-independent experiments on EMO-DB, SAVEE, RAVDESS, and FAU Aibo datasets. The results show that the proposed SER model is superior to the single reservoir and the state-of-the-art studies.

Exploring serious games for stroke rehabilitation: a scoping review.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: Stroke is the main cause of long-term disability and happens mostly in the older population. Stroke affected patients experience either of the cognitive, visual or motor losses and recovery requires time and patience as they have to do physical exercises every day and at times repetitively. There are various types of stroke rehabilitation exercises focussing on technological solutions that include therapies performed using games. Motion-based games are popular in encouraging participants to perform repetitive tasks without being getting bored. Therefore, in this study, we have explored studies that included the use of games for stroke rehabilitation to understand the design principles and characteristics of the games used for these purposes. METHOD: A number of medical respositories were searched for relevant articles in a window of 2008-2018. 18 studies were chosen for the scoping review depending on the inclusion criteria, and design principles used in these studies are analysed and evaluated. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: We present main findings from our review concerning the attributes of existing games for stroke rehabilitation such as meaningful play, handling of failures, emphasising challenge, and the value of feedback. We conclude with a list of design recommendations that future serious game developers can consider while designing interfaces for stroke patients.Implications for RehabilitationThis review exhibits that the usage of gaming technologies is a very effective interactive mechanism for stroke based rehabilitation.Further our review also shows that serious games provide an avenue and opportunity for customized and highly contextualized gameplayOur review also suggests that effective features to incorporate into serious games for rehabilitation includes; facilitating challenge and recovery from errors.

Efficacy of Emerging Technologies to Manage Childhood Obesity.

Childhood obesity is a widespread medical condition and presents a formidable challenge for public health. Long-term treatment strategies and early prevention strategies are required because obese children are more likely to carry this condition into adulthood, increasing their risk of developing other major health disorders. The present review analyses various technological interventions available for childhood obesity prevention and treatment. It also examines whether machine learning and technological interventions can play vital roles in its management. Twenty-six studies were shortlisted for the review using various technological strategies and analysed regarding their efficacy. While most of the selected studies showed positive outcomes, there was a lack of studies using robots and artificial intelligence to manage obesity in children. The use of machine learning was observed in various studies, and the integration of social robots and other efficacious strategies may be effective for treating childhood obesity in the future.

An explainable machine learning framework for lung cancer hospital length of stay prediction.

This work introduces a predictive Length of Stay (LOS) framework for lung cancer patients using machine learning (ML) models. The framework proposed to deal with imbalanced datasets for classification-based approaches using electronic healthcare records (EHR). We have utilized supervised ML methods to predict lung cancer inpatients LOS during ICU hospitalization using the MIMIC-III dataset. Random Forest (RF) Model outperformed other models and achieved predicted results during the three framework phases. With clinical significance features selection, over-sampling methods (SMOTE and ADASYN) achieved the highest AUC results (98% with CI 95%: 95.3-100%, and 100% respectively). The combination of Over-sampling and under-sampling achieved the second-highest AUC results (98%, with CI 95%: 95.3-100%, and 97%, CI 95%: 93.7-100% SMOTE-Tomek, and SMOTE-ENN respectively). Under-sampling methods reported the least important AUC results (50%, with CI 95%: 40.2-59.8%) for both (ENN and Tomek- Links). Using ML explainable technique called SHAP, we explained the outcome of the predictive model (RF) with SMOTE class balancing technique to understand the most significant clinical features that contributed to predicting lung cancer LOS with the RF model. Our promising framework allows us to employ ML techniques in-hospital clinical information systems to predict lung cancer admissions into ICU.

Clarify Sit-to-Stand Muscle Synergy and Tension Changes in Subacute Stroke Rehabilitation by Musculoskeletal Modeling.

Post-stroke patients exhibit distinct muscle activation electromyography (EMG) features in sit-to-stand (STS) due to motor deficiency. Muscle activation amplitude, related to muscle tension and muscle synergy activation levels, is one of the defining EMG features that reflects post-stroke motor functioning and motor impairment. Although some qualitative findings are available, it is not clear if and how muscle activation amplitude-related biomechanical attributes may quantitatively reflect during subacute stroke rehabilitation. To better enable a longitudinal investigation into a patient's muscle activation changes during rehabilitation or an inter-subject comparison, EMG normalization is usually applied. However, current normalization methods using maximum voluntary contraction (MVC) or within-task peak/mean EMG may not be feasible when MVC cannot be obtained from stroke survivors due to motor paralysis and the subject of comparison is EMG amplitude. Here, focusing on the paretic side, we first propose a novel, joint torque-based normalization method that incorporates musculoskeletal modeling, forward dynamics simulation, and mathematical optimization. Next, upon method validation, we apply it to quantify changes in muscle tension and muscle synergy activation levels in STS motor control units for patients in subacute stroke rehabilitation. The novel method was validated against MVC-normalized EMG data from eight healthy participants, and it retained muscle activation amplitude differences for inter- and intra-subject comparisons. The proposed joint torque-based method was also compared with the common static optimization based on squared muscle activation and showed higher simulation accuracy overall. Serial STS measurements were conducted with four post-stroke patients during their subacute rehabilitation stay (137 ± 22 days) in the hospital. Quantitative results of patients suggest that maximum muscle tension and activation level of muscle synergy temporal patterns may reflect the effectiveness of subacute stroke rehabilitation. A quality comparison between muscle synergies computed with the conventional within-task peak/mean EMG normalization and our proposed method showed that the conventional was prone to activation amplitude overestimation and underestimation. The contributed method and findings help recapitulate and understand the post-stroke motor recovery process, which may facilitate developing more effective rehabilitation strategies for future stroke survivors.

Trends and Technologies in Rehabilitation of Foot Drop: A Systematic Review.

INTRODUCTION: Foot Drop (FD) is a condition, which is very commonly found in post-stoke patients; however it can also be seen in patients with multiple sclerosis, and cerebral palsy. It is a sign of neuromuscular damage caused by the weakness of the muscles. There are various approaches of FD's rehabilitation, such as physiotherapy, surgery, and the use of technological devices. Recently, researchers have worked on developing various technologies to enhance assisting and rehabilitation of FD. AREAS COVERED: This review analyzes different types of technologies available for FD. This include devices that are available commercially or still under research. 101 studies published between 2015 and 2020 were identified for the review, many were excluded due to various reasons, e.g., were not robot-based devices, did not include FD as one of the targeted diseases, or was insufficient information. 24 studies that met our inclusion criteria were assessed. These studies were further classified into two different categories: robot-based ankle-foot orthosis (RAFO) and Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) devices. EXPERT OPINION: Studies included showed that both RAFO and FES showed considerable improvement in the gait cycle of the patients. Future trends are inclining towards integrating FES with other neuro-concepts such as muscle-synergies for further developments.