The paper deals with the problem of suitably coordinating the manoeuvring of a non-holonomic vehicle and the motion of a supported manipulation system (composed by one or two arms) when the overall system is commanded to execute a given grasping or manipulation task. The objective being clearly that of suitably exploiting the extra dof’s offered by the vehicle for better accomplishing the assig...

Impairment of patients with cerebellar disease in prehension is well recognized. So far specific localizations within the human cerebellum associated with the impairment have rarely been assessed. To address this question we performed voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM) in patients with chronic focal cerebellar lesions in relation to specific deficits in prehensile movements. Patients wit...

Optoelectronic tweezers enables parallel manipulation of individual single cells using optical addressing and optically induced dielectrophoretic force. This provides a useful platform for performing a variety of biological functions, such as cell manipulation, cell sorting, and cell electroporation. However, in order to obtain more reliable cellular manipulation, especially of adherent mammali...

The island of Vis belongs to middle Dalmatian group of islands with caracteristics Mediterranean climate. The assumption was that the dominant diet of the inhabitants is also Mediterranean. Such diet is considered to be one of the best for the prevention of many complex and chronic diseases, as confirmed by numerous studies in different parts of the World. This study showed a shift in dietary h...

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a potentially debilitating disorder that can place serious limitations on patient functionality and overall quality of life. Traditionally considered a disease of the elderly, more recent perceptions of OA reveal a broad spectrum of age and disease severity among patients. Because there are no curative or disease-modifying therapies for patients with OA at present, curren...

Grasping an object is a matter of first moving a prehensile organ at some position in the world, and then managing the contact relationship between the prehensile organ and the object. Once the contact relationship has been established and made stable, the object is part of the body and it can move in the world. As any action, the action of grasping is ontologically anchored in the physical spa...

U pper extremity loss represents a life-changing, often devastating event, affecting nearly every activity of daily living and subsequently leaving a patient with substantial disability. The potential immediate dependency and despair resulting from the loss of one or both hands cannot be overstated. Promising technological advances in upper extremity prostheses include improved neural-control i...