INTRODUCTION The hand grip strength test provides useful and reliable information about overall health. Different studies have investigated the optimal grip span for determining maximal hand grip strength in different populations such as adults, adolescents and children without disabilities. OBJECTIVE To ascertain whether there is an optimal grip span for determining maximal hand grip strengt...

[Purpose] Eye-hand coordination declines with age, but physical activity is known to slow down the degeneration. Playing mahjong involves lots of eye-hand coordination. The objective was to investigate the relationship between playing mahjong and eye-hand coordination in older adults using a fast finger-pointing paradigm. [Subjects and Methods] Forty-one community dwelling older adults aged six...

Is there any difference between matching the position of the hands by asking the subjects to move them to the same spatial location or to mirror-symmetric locations with respect to the body midline? If the motion of the hands were planned in the extrinsic space, the mirror-symmetric task would imply an additional challenge, because we would need to flip the coordinates of the target on the othe...

We investigated the change of the corticospinal tract (CST) in the unaffected hemisphere by the change of the dominant hand in stroke patients, using diffusion tensor tractography (DTT).Forty-eight stroke patients with right-hand dominance were recruited. The patients were assigned to 3 groups: group A (12 patients)-right-hand dominance was maintained after the right-hand weakness, group B (17 ...

A reliable speech enhancement method is important for speech applications as a pre-processing step to improve their overall performance. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency domain method for single channel speech enhancement. Conventional frequency domain methods usually neglect the correlation between neighboring time-frequency components of the signals. In the proposed method, we take...

Electrocardiographic (ECG) signals are emerging as a recent trend in the field of biometrics. In this paper, we propose a novel ECG biometric system that combines clustering and classification methodologies. Our approach is based on dominant-set clustering, and provides a framework for outlier removal and template selection. It enhances the typical workflows, by making them better suited to new...

BACKGROUND The bilateral transfer of a motor skill is a physiological phenomenon: the development of a motor skill with one hand can trigger the development of the same ability of the other hand. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to verify whether bilateral transfer is associated with a specific brain activation pattern using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). METHODS The m...

background: noise is one of the most important harmful agents in work environment. noise pollution in oil refinery industries is related to workers' health. this study aimed to determine the overall noise pollution of an oil refinery operation and its frequency analysis to determine the control plan for a vent noise in these industries. methods: this experimental study performed in control unit...