A Glove With an Objective Touch

A Glove With an Objective Touch A Glove With an Objective Touch A Glove With an Objective TouchLike beauty, muscle stiffness is in the eye of the beholder. That revelation drove researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Rady Childrens Hospital to develop a sensor-filled glove that enables them to better evaluate and treat patients stymied by brain injury, stroke, and such debilitating muscle-control conditions as multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy.Doctors traditionally use touch and feel to assess the force and speed at which they can move a stiff muscle. The technique is highly subjective, and two doctors evaluating the same patient often reach very different conclusions.The glove literally puts a sophisticated measurement instrument into the physicians hand. It uses hundreds of sensors to provide objective feedback about the force a doctor applies to an arm or leg, the speed at which the limb moves, and the threshold at which patients begin to feel discomfort. This information would help physicians prescribe medications mora precisely and safely.The prototype consists of mora than 300 pressure sensors attached to the palm of a sports glove with an accelerometer on the back. Advanced signal-processing algorithms analyze and map the data these sensors send back in real time. The result is a numerical reading that more precisely assesses a patients muscle stiffness.It may sound simple, but it was anything but. We thought wed just put the glove on the doctors hand and measure how much resistance they were feeling, said research scientist Harinath Garudadri, an associate researcher at UCSDs Qualcomm Institute who leads the project.Professor Harinath Garudadri Ileft) and graduate student Fei Deng are testing the new technology. Image Erik Jepsen/UC San DiegoGarudadris original plan was to calibrate the glove to a standard evaluation method known as the Modified Ashworth Scale, a six-point measuring system that doctors score as they move a patie nts limbs with their bare hands. When Garudadri asked two specialists to assess the muscle tightness, or spasticity, of five cerebral palsy patients, their assessments agreed a mere 27 percent of the time.We didnt expect that, Garudadri said. This scale was a lot more subjective than we had realized.The researchers looked for a better way to calibrate the glove. They ended up with an artificial arm that simulates how humans flex their muscles. Operators manually set the arms resistance (using a mechanism that works like a bicycles brakes) between 5 and 20 pounds. When the physician moves the arm, onboard sensors compute its resistance, arm speed, and the amount of work the doctor performs.Then Garudadri and his team played doctor. After situation the arms resistance, they checked how well the glove measured the power needed to move the arm. The glove got it right 64 percent of the time.A multidisciplinary team of scientists, students, technicians, and computer programmers has worked to boost the systems reliability by improving the gloves sensors, making them robust, and experimenting with 3D printing them onto the glove.Although nothing in medicine is foolproof, Garudadri believes that if the team can increase agreement to 90 percent, the glove would be reliable enough to provide doctors with additional information to supplement the Modified Ashworth Scale. That would be a giant step forward in assessing spasticity, and enable doctors to use the glove to guide treatment options and improve patient care, he said.Garudadri plans further tests to make sure the doctors are comfortable with the gloves design and the information it provides. After all, he said, they are the health care experts who make clinical decisions.Going forward, Garudadri hopes to develop similar gloves for other procedures where doctors now rely on touch and feel to evaluate a patients condition. These include monitoring spine health, assessing the severity of hip dislocations in infants, r ehabilitation therapy, and physical therapy.View current and past issues of Mechanical Engineering. For Further Discussion We thought wed just put the glove on the doctors hand and measure how much resistance they were feeling...This scale was a lot more subjective than we had realized. Prof. Harinath Garudadri, University of California, San Diego

The Secret to Being Excited About Work After a Break - The Muse

The Secret to Being Excited About Work After a Break - The MuseThe Secret to Being Excited About Work After a Break When you had to head back to work after vacation, you might be dragging your feet a little bit. After all, whowants to be back to the grindstone after remembering what its like to sleep in, spending your days doing whatever your heart desires, and generally not having a care in the world?Ill tell you who- people who have found enjoyment in their work. In an article on his blog Sideways Thoughts, Chad Renando walks us through the conditions that must be present in order for us to find flow in our work- meaning well really feel fulfilled by it (and want to come back). He lays out the following questions to ask yourself as you consider the work you have ahead of youCan you introduce appropriate challenge or develop additional skill in what you do to keep it interesting? If not, can you seek out new activities that meet your criteria? Can you find an acceptable degree of su ffering while managing your anxiety levels?Can you become proficient so as to merge your thought and action?Do you have clear goals, and is there sufficient feedback to determine if you are closer to achieving those goals? Can you accept the feedback as simply a measure of how well you are achieving your goal?Are you able to quiet the noise of life and concentrate on the task at hand?Do you feel you have control, while also having appropriate levels of risk?Can you take your eyes off yourself and lose your self-consciousness in favour of the activity?When you perform the activity, does time melt away?If youve been dreading coming back to work, use these questions to examine why. Can you figure out where your work falls short and seek out ways to fix it? Maybe the problem is that you dont have clear goals in your position, and a long conversation with your manager could help. Is there one aspect of your job that you really love? Think about how you can morph your job a little to focu s more on that. Or, perhaps, its time for a new job entirely.Whatever the case may be, its worth spending the time to create work that you really enjoy. By next January, youll be itching to come back after the break.Photo of happy woman courtesy of Shutterstock.

Erasing your credit score and other life lessons on debt

Erasing your credit score and other life lessons on debtErasing your credit score and other life lessons on debtWhat is the biggest trap people fall into? Debt.Your credit score should really be called a sucker score because its a number that exists for only one reason to tell banks how much money theyre going to be able to make off of you. The higher it is, the more of your money goes to them.Thats not how theysell it, of course. They sell it as a metric for determining credit worthiness. But if you really break down what makes a credit score higher or lower, youll see that they arent being honest about what it actually is.For example, if youre the type of rolle who doesnt use credit all that much, but can make large purchases and pay them off in a matter of days or weeks, thatshouldbe an indicator that youre the fruchtwein credit worthy person on the planet. Right? Shouldnt the people who do that have the highest credit scores?Nope. Youre actually penalized for that, and your credi t score goes down. Banks hate you, because you dont carry debt long enough for them to make anything off of you.You know who banks like? The people who take a long time to pay things off. Thats why they tell you to carry a balance on your credit cards, to finance things you could easily pay cash for and take your time paying it off, to refinance your house and start the loan over for another 30 years instead of paying it down, and so on. And when you do these things, they reward you with a higher credit score so you can keep borrowing more, keep juggling as much as you can afford, and keep your money flowing to them.Thats why they give you bonuses like the ability to skip payments, reward points, airline miles, limit increases, and the like. Thats why they send you offers in the mail for retailers who give you discounts when you use their card. Want to trade up a car youre already upside down on? No problem, just roll the negative equity into the loan for the new one. Go pick out a boat while youre at it.Banks win when you stay in debt.And thats the trap people fall into perpetual debt. Most people dont even realize theyre being played, theyve been taught how to be good little customers and focus on their credit score. You purposely stay in debt when you dont need to, so you have theoptionof using debt when you want to. Eventually all of your money is going out the door to monthly payments, and then youneedto use a credit card at the grocery store just to manage your day to day cash flow. Today, most people couldnt even afford the car theyrecurrently drivingif they hadnt financed it. Thats sad.Whatsmoresad is that none of that stuff is even yours. Youre just renting it from the bank. All it takes is one little hiccup in your income for the house of cards to come crashing down, the bank takes it all back, and everything you paid along the way welches for nothing.And what happens when you figure the game out, and decide to opt out of it? When you actually pay offeverythingand have no more debt? Your credit score goes to zero.Yep, literally zero. Its not a myth.Hows that for irony? Actions that should have told banks Give this guy whatever amount of money he wants, you can trust him.instead became Screw that guy, he wont play the game and we arent going to make squat off him.But you know what? Im pretty happy about that. I decided a long time ago that if I couldnt pay cash, I couldnt afford it. I looked at my paycheck, then looked at how much of it was going out the door toward monthly payments, and imagined what my savings account would look like if it wasnt.Buying cars, taking trips, all of it gets really easy when your paycheck goes into your bank account and stays there instead of going right back out to bills.You can get out of the trap you just have to commit to staying out of debt. Pay off your credit cards and close them. Ignore the interest rates, just start with the one with the smallest balance, focus all of your extra cash on paying it off, then close it and work your way up to the next one.Pay off your car and keep driving it instead of running out and financing another one. You could write a check for your next car if your car payment was going into your savings account for a year or two.Break the cycle, live on what you make, and your credit score wont matter.This article originally appeared onQuora