OBJECTIVE Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are at increased risk of falling. In healthy elderly persons with a history of falling, a reduced ability to avoid obstacles while walking has been shown to relate to increased fall risk. The aim of this study was to determine whether this potential risk factor for falls would also be present in persons with RA. METHODS Twelve RA patients and ...

We prove existence, uniqueness and optimal regularity of solutions to the stationary obstacle problem defined by the fractional Laplacian operator with drift, in the subcritical regime. As in [1], we localize our problem by considering a suitable extension operator introduced in [2]. The structure of the extension equation is different from the one constructed in [1], in that the obstacle funct...

Spatio-temporal gaze behaviour patterns were analysed as normal participants wearing a mobile eye tracker approached and stepped over obstacles of varying height in the travel path. We examined the frequency and duration of three types of gaze fixation with respect to the participants' stepping patterns: obstacle fixation (ObsFix); travel fixation (TravFix) (when the gaze is stable and travelli...

We developed a novel locomotor task in which cats step over obstacles that move at a different speed from that of the treadmill on which the cat is walking: we refer to this as a visual dissociation locomotion task. Slowing the speed of the obstacle with respect to that of the treadmill sometimes led to a major change in strategy so that cats made two steps with the hindlimbs before stepping ov...

A special procedure for the numerical solution of two-dimensional obstacle scattering problems is considered. The original exterior problem is approximated by introducing a rectangular artiicial boundary and by imposing an absorbing boundary condition. The scatterer is assumed to have a dielectric coating of variable thickness. Finite element discretization is performed with a structured mesh, ...

In this paper, we propose a novel method of object detection in bad weather conditions like Fog and smoke. It is based on statistical model of dark channel prior to estimate the thickness of the haze and physics based image restoration approach. Further applying simple image enhancement techniques improve the visibility of an obstacle in the line of sight. Using this prior with this imaging mod...

Long-term durability is a major obstacle limiting the widespread use of lithium-ion batteries in heavy-duty applications and others demanding extended lifetime. As one of the root causes of the degradation of battery performance, the electrode failure mechanisms are still unknown. In this paper, we reveal the fundamental fracture mechanisms of single-crystal silicon electrodes over extended lit...

In this paper, the bisection of the local mesh refinement in self adaptive finite element is applied to the obstacle problem of elliptic variational inequalities .We try to find the approximated region of the contact in the obstacle problem efficiently .Numerical examples are given for the obstacle problem. Key-Words: obstacle problem, variational inequalities, self adaptive finite element, bis...

This paper proposes a novel vector field navigation method by using the velocity vector of a robot to avoid obstacles in dynamic environment. Shifting vector and virtual obstacle are proposed to derive the center of repulsive field which makes the robot move away from the obstacle: The shifting vector is derived from the velocity vector of the robot and the obstacle and the virtual obstacle is ...