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Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common children and adults movement disorder that is associated with life-long disability and multiple impairments. Children with CP demonstrate poor fine and gross motor function due to psychomotor disturbances. Early rehabilitation programs are essential for children with CP and should be appropriate for the age and functional condition of the patients. Robot-assisted...
This paper describes an automatic technique to segment the ventricles from brain MRI of young children. The segmentation approach involves skull stripping, extraction of the total cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), isolation of extra-cerebral CSF, removal of CSF in the sulci and fissures and final ventricle segmentation. The segmentation achieves a mean Dice ratio of 0.9246, sensitivity of 0.9363 and specificity...
Query suggestions (QS) tailored specifically for children are slowly gaining research attention in response to the growth in Internet use by children. Even though QS offered by popular search engines adequately meet the information needs of the general public, they do not achieve equivalent effectiveness from a child's perspective. This is because children's search behaviors, interests, cognitive...
Several studies support the hypothesis that robot assisted therapy for adult subjects with motor impairments resulting from neurological damages can be beneficial in promoting the recovery process when conveyed in conjunction to conventional rehabilitation. Robotic therapy has been mainly applied to adult subjects and little is known about children or youth. This study presents the results of a robot-assisted...
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) exhibit a range of developmental disabilities, with mild to severe effects in social interaction and communication. Children with PDD-NOS, Autism and co-existing conditions are facing enormous challenges in their lives, dealing with their difficulties in sensory perception, repetitive behaviors and interests. These challenges result in them being less...
The average child in the developed world now spends more than 2 hours per day playing video games. The present study asks: (i) whether children who play video games exhibit enhancement of performance across a broad range of executive functions; (ii) whether there are gender differences; (iii) if there is a relationship between the amount of time a child reports playing video games and their performance...
We present Haptics Assisted Training (HAT) System, a force feedback workstation for transferring and improving handwriting skill. The HAT system is the first practical handwriting training system whose usability was tested both in typical and special education classrooms of a local school district. Simulating the role of occupational therapists (OT), the HAT system guides the user's hand along the...
In order to increase the safety for children, with help of a higher degree of control and routine during school transport, an EU-project, SAFEWAY2SCHOOL1, started in 2010. This project aims to take the previous study, made in 2008 in Kristianstad, a step further and highlight and enhance the technological aspects of different subsystems in order to achieve a system even more useful. Within the project...
Even though protecting the children — one of the most vulnerable transport system's users — is of great importance for all societies, bus transport to school is a highly under investigated area in many EU-countries. School transport by bus is not just about going by the school bus. It should be considered from a door-to-door perspective. A system that supports all involved stakeholders and take into...
3D motion analysis was applied to assess goal-directed arm movements in 15 children with cerebral palsy (CP) before and after four weeks of home training with low-cost motion interactive video games. The results indicated that the children improved movement precision when playing the virtual games, improved movement smoothness when reaching for real targets, and reduced the involvement of the trunk...
The prediction of asthma that persists throughout childhood and into adulthood, in early life of a child has practical, clinical and prognostic implications and sets the basis for the future prevention. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) seems to be a superior tool for analyzing data sets where nonlinear relationships are existing between the input data and the predicted output. This study presents...
How is it possible for an autonomous agent to learn and retrieve hierarchically organized information? The question is particularly interesting if there is not a simple, tree-like hierarchy, but when low-level items may belong to several superordinate elements. In this article we propose a solution for this problem following the ideas of O'Connor et al., which are guided by the observation that children...
Recent increase in the number of Autism cases has triggered an alarm in our society. Lack of effective diagnostics, interventions and associated cost makes early intervention and long term treatment difficult. In this paper, we describe novel methods to assist management by automatically detecting stereotypical behavioral patterns using accelerometer data. We use the Iterative Subspace Identification...
This paper will describe the NJIT-RAVR system, which combines adaptive robotics with complex VR simulations for the rehabilitation of upper extremity impairments and function in children with CP. The feasibility of this system is examined in the context of two pilot studies. The NJIT-RAVR system consists of the Haptic Master, a 6 degrees of freedom, admittance controlled robot and a suite of rehabilitation...
The current study introduces a novel rehabilitation robot for treatment of impaired ankle in children with cerebral palsy (CP). The treatment consisted of passive stretching under intelligent control and active movement training with motivating game-playing using the portable robot. After 18 sessions of training (3 sessions/week for 6 weeks), we found significant improvement in 12 children with CP...
As part of a larger study evaluating the effects of trunk restraint on the kinematics of arm movements in children with cerebral palsy (CP), we evaluated the level of cooperation and satisfaction of the children when practicing arm and hand movements during play-like activities in a physical environment (PE) compared to a video-capture based (IREX, GestureTek) virtual environment (VE) using 5-point...
This paper will describe the NJIT-RAVR system, which combines adaptive robotics with complex VR simulations for the rehabilitation of upper extremity impairments and function in children with CP. The feasibility of this system is examined in the context of two pilot studies. The NJIT-RAVR system consists of the Haptic Master, a 6 degrees of freedom, admittance controlled robot and a suite of rehabilitation...
Figure copying is a complex visuo-motor skill that uses aspects of vision and memory to guide precisely directed action. Previous studies have shown that explicit visual training improves the copying abilities of young children. This study considers training in a haptic virtual environment as a method to improve copying abilities in people who show weak performance in such tasks, namely normally developing...
We designed a virtual hand-writing teaching system for children with handwriting difficulties due to attention or motor deficits, using a haptic interface that could provide a neutral, repetitive engaging approach to letter writing. The approach we took to accomplish this included: (a) using letter primitives, (b) user friendly interface for teachers, therapists, subjects and parents, (c) adjustable...
Virtual environments can make repetitive motor rehabilitation exercises more motivating and thereby more effective. We hypothesize that participation-dependent multimodal stimuli increase the patientpsilas activity as expressed through force exertion during robot-aided treadmill training. In a single case study with one patient (12 years old), we were able to show that active participation increased...
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