The aim of this study was to compare immediate, daily and weekly variation in respiratory resistance measured by means of the forced oscillation technique (Rrs,FOT) to spirometric indices in 7-12 year old children with chronic respiratory symptoms. The lung function measurements were performed in 19 children on 4 days, i.e. two consecutive days during two consecutive weeks. On each day, the mea...

Mechanical impedance is the dynamic generalization of stiffness, and determines interactive behavior by definition. Although the argument for explicitly controlling impedance is strong, impedance control has had only a modest impact on robotic manipulator control practice. This is due in part to the fact that it is difficult to select suitable impedances given tasks. A spatial impedance control...

BACKGROUND Rumination increases vulnerability to depression, exacerbates and perpetuates negative moods. This study was aimed to examine the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the 10-item Ruminative Response Scale (RRS-10) in a large undergraduate sample. METHODS A sample of 5,236 university students finished the RRS and the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (...

Variability in rapid response system (RRS) characteristics based on the admitted wards is unknown. We aimed to compare differences in the clinical characteristics of RRS activation between patients admitted to medical versus surgical services. We reviewed patients admitted to the hospital who were detected by the RRS from October 2012 to February 2014 at a tertiary care academic hospital. We co...

In human robot dialogue, identifying intended referents from human partners’ spatial language is challenging. This is partly due to automated inference of potentially ambiguous underlying reference system (i.e., frame of reference). To improve spatial language understanding, we conducted an empirical study to investigate the prevalence of ambiguities of frame of reference. Our findings indicate...

This paper presents a semantic spatial language grammar and a novel chunking method that allows nested structures to be encoded as a single label. The proposed semantic grammar, when used with a cognitive architecture described elsewhere, makes it possible for a mobile robot to follow complex, human-generated spatial descriptions for a fetch task. The semantic grammar is based on an interdiscip...

Social interaction between humans takes place in the spatial environment on a daily basis. We occupy space for ourselves and respect the dynamics of spaces that are occupied by others. In human-robot interaction, spatial models are commonly used for structuring relatively far-away interactions or passing-by scenarios. This work instead, focuses on the transition between distant and close commun...

When building computational artifacts that are capable of social relationships with human, it is desirable for these artifacts to possess a human form like those of humanoids, bipedal robots and anthropomorphic agents. If these artifacts appear human-like, they can display nonverbal social interaction cues. In particular, physically embodied artifacts such as bipedal robots can use the nonverba...

This paper reports recent progress on modeling the grounded co-acquisition of syntax and semantics of locative spatial language in developmental robots. We show how a learner robot can learn to produce and interpret spatial utterances in guided-learning interactions with a tutor robot (equipped with a system for producing English spatial phrases). The tutor guides the learning process by simpli...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have found high temperatures increase the risk of mortality in summer. However, little is known about whether a sharp decrease or increase in temperature between neighbouring days has any effect on mortality. METHOD Poisson regression models were used to estimate the association between temperature change and mortality in summer in Brisbane, Australia during 1996-2...