OBJECTIVE Joint protection aims to reduce pain and local inflammation, preserve the integrity of joint structures and improve function. There is evidence that it can improve pain and function in the short term, but the long-term effects are uncertain. This study evaluated the effects of joint protection in early rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS A randomized, controlled, assessor-blinded tri...

Flip-flops may change walking gait pattern, increase muscle activity and joint loading, and predispose wearers to foot problems, despite that quantitative evidence is scarce. The purpose of this study was to examine the lower limb muscle co-contraction and joint contact force in flip-flops gait, and compare with those of barefoot and sports shoes walking. Ten healthy males were instructed to pe...

The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a central generic problem in artificial intelligence. Considerable effort has been made in identifying properties which ensure tractability in such problems. In this paper we study hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems; that is, properties which guarantee tractability of the given soft constraint problem, but properties which do not depend ...

Joint attention is one of the most important cognitive functions for the emergence of communication not only between humans but also between humans and robots. In the previous work [8], we have demonstrated how a robot can acquire the primary joint attention behavior (gaze following) without external evaluation. However, this method needs the human to tell the robot when to shift its gaze. This...

With the integration of 5G and Internet Things (IoT), application large-scale IoT devices networking is increasingly extensive, such as building management, property maintenance, autonomous vehicles, healthcare, shopping to tourism. In these scenes, volume data transmission quite large, especially visual (image, video, et al). However, due limited resource devices, battery, power, bandwidth, co...