Visual stabilisation of body sway in a patient with severe deficits of the vestibular system (due to gentamicin treatment) and the somatosensory system (due to polyneuropathy) was studied. With eyes open the patient was able to stand and walk slowly. With eyes closed he lost balance within one second. In order to optimise visual stabilisation he intuitively searched for nearby visual targets. H...

Brain injury, genetic manipulations, and pharmacological treatments can result in alterations of motor skills in mice. Fine motor coordination and balance can be assessed by the beam walking assay. The goal of this test is for the mouse to stay upright and walk across an elevated narrow beam to a safe platform. This test takes place over 3 consecutive days: 2 days of training and 1 day of testi...

The balance disorders are usually studied by the body sway and the postural adjustments induced by an unexpected perturbation during upright stance. In the last years different experimental and commercial systems for dynamic posturography were proposed. These systems can realize sudden anteroposterior translation or rotation about the ankle axis. Recently a certain number of studies empathized ...

This study aimed to examine the trial-to-trial reliability and sex differences in a foot pressure load balance test and its relationship to physical characteristics in 396 preschool children (201 boys and 195 girls). The subjects were asked to maintain an upright standing posture for 10 seconds three times on the Footview Clinic, an instrument designed to calculate the right-left and anterior-p...

The dynamics of a PHANTOM R © Premium 1.5A haptic device from SensAble Technologies, Inc. is experimentally identified and analyzed for different installations of the device and its accessories, such as the typical upright, upside-down, with gimbal and counter-balance weight, and with force sensor . An earlier formulation of the robot dynamic model is augmented with a friction model, linearly p...

The effect of resistance strength training on different phases of reactive postural responses to upright-stance perturbation was assessed in elderly women. Perturbation to body balance was produced by fast arm movements aiming at lifting different loads in either certain or uncertain contexts. Results from center-of-pressure analysis showed that lifting a light load under uncertainty led to mor...

Intrinsic dynamics of the central vestibular system (CVS) appear to be at least partly determined by the symmetries of its connections. The CVS contributes to whole-body functions such as upright balance and maintenance of gaze direction. These functions coordinate disparate senses (visual, inertial, somatosensory, auditory) and body movements (leg, trunk, head/neck, eye). They are also unified...

We investigate the nature of charge transport in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) using self-assembled layers of DNA in large-area molecular junctions. A protocol was developed that yields dense monolayers where the DNA molecules are not standing upright, but are lying flat on the substrate. As a result the charge transport is measured not along the DNA molecules but in the transverse direction, acr...