BACKGROUND Psychological features have been related to trunk muscle activation patterns in low back pain (LBP). We hypothesised higher pain-related fear would relate to changes in trunk mechanical properties, such as higher trunk stiffness. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the relationship between trunk mechanical properties and psychological features in people with recurrent LBP. METHODS The relatio...

INTRODUCTION Patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP) often demonstrate altered timing of thorax rotations in the transverse plane during gait. Increased axial trunk stiffness has been claimed to cause this movement pattern. OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to assess whether axial trunk stiffness is increased in gait in CLBP patients. METHODS 15 CLBP patients and 15 healthy cont...

To measure various components with nano-scale precision, a new high-precision touch-trigger probe using a single low-cost sensor for a micro-coordinate measuring machine (CMM) is presented in this paper. The sensor is composed of a laser diode, a plane mirror, a focusing lens, and a quadrant photo detector (QPD). The laser beam from the laser diode with an incident angle is reflected by the pla...

Experimental techniques for estimating the two-dimensional dynamic stiffness of the human arm over a wide range of conditions have been developed. A robotic manipulator has been developed to create loads against which subjects perform various tasks and also to impose perturbations onto the endpoint of the arm to allow estimation of its mechanical properties. The manipulator can produce static e...

Stiffness of the human foot is central to its mechanical function, such as elastic energy storage and propulsion. Its doubly-arched structure, manifested as longitudinal and transverse arches, is thought to underlie the stiff nature. However, previous studies have focused solely on the longitudinal arch, and little is known about whether and how the transverse arch impacts the foot’s stiffness....

Humans produce speech by controlling a complex biomechanical apparatus to achieve desired speech sounds. We show here that kinematic variability in speech may be influenced by patterns of jaw stiffness. A robotic device was used to deliver mechanical perturbations to the jaw to quantify its stiffness in the mid-sagittal plane. Measured jaw stiffness was anisotropic. Stiffness was greatest along...

In recent years, ultrasonic methods have been developed that can measure the mechanical stiffness of composites. The Lamb wave velocity is directly related to the material parameters, so an effective method exists to ascertain the stiffness of composites by measuring the velocity of these waves. In this study, a Lamb wave measurement system was used to measure the bending and out-of-plane stiff...

We perform a systematic study of in-plane and out-of-plane proton and neutron flow from nucleus-nucleus collisions within the BUU transport approach employing different parameter sets for the mean-field potentials that can be characterized by the nuclear incompressibility and the stiffness of the momentum-dependent potential. We find that a simultaneous description of the experimental data from...