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Road authorities worldwide can leverage the advances in vehicle technology by continuously monitoring their roads’ conditions to minimize road maintenance costs. The existing methods for carrying out road condition surveys involve manual observations using standard survey forms, performed by qualified personnel. These methods are expensive, time-consuming, infrequent, and can hardly provide real-time information. Some automated approaches also exist but are very expensive since they require special vehicles equipped with computing devices and sensors for data collection and processing. This research aims to leverage the advances in vehicle technology in providing a cheap and real-time approach to carry out road condition monitoring (RCM). This study developed a deep learning model using the You Only Look Once, Version 5 (YOLOv5) algorithm that was trained to capture and categorize flexible pavement distresses (FPD) and reached 95% precision, 93.4% recall, and 97.2% mean Average Precision. Using vehicle built-in cameras and GPS sensors, these distresses were detected, images were captured, and locations were recorded. This was validated on campus roads and parking lots using a car featured with a built-in camera and GPS. The vehicles’ built-in technologies provided a more cost-effective and efficient road condition monitoring approach that could also provide real-time road conditions.

This study examined the right hemisphere contribution to the production of linguistic prosody where acoustic features of prosodic structures in different linguistic contexts were examined accompanied by perceptual judgements. When control and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) subjects were asked to produce lexical stress differences (Experiment 1), prosodic boundaries to denote syntactic constituents (Experiment 2), and questions and statements (Experiment 3) conveyed through prosody, both groups were similar in producing the duration, F0 and amplitude acoustic cues within prosodic structures to convey different linguistic meanings. Listeners were able to perceive the meanings of the productions of both groups in Experiments 1 and 3, but had greater difficulty perceiving the productions of the RHD group in Experiment 2. These findings, which suggest that the right hemisphere has a limited role in the production of linguistic prosody, are discussed in relation to perceptual theories of prosody.

Background: Research addressing prosodic deficits in brain-damaged populations has concentrated on the specialised capabilities of the right and the left cerebral hemispheres in processing the global characteristics of prosody. This focus has been of interest in that the fundamental frequency (F0), duration and intensity acoustic characteristics within a prosodic structure can convey different linguistic and nonlinguistic information. Much of the research investigating this interesting phenomenon has produced conflicting results. As such, different theories have been proposed in an attempt to provide plausible explanations of the conflicting findings regarding hemispheric specialisation in processing prosodic structures. Aims: The purpose of this study was to examine one of the theories, the functional lateralisation theory, through four experiments that altered the linguistic and nonlinguistic functions across a range of prosodic structures. Methods & Procedures: Three groups of subjects participated in each of the four experiments: (1) eight subjects with LHD, (2) eight subjects with RHD, and (3) eight control subjects. The first experiment addressed the extent to which the processing of lexical stress differences would be lateralised to the left or right hemisphere by requiring listeners to determine the meanings and grammatical assignments of two-syllable words conveyed through stressed or unstressed syllables. In another linguistic condition, the second experiment placed demands on syntactic parsing operations by requiring listeners to parse syntactically ambiguous sentences which were disambiguated through the perception of prosodic boundaries located at syntactic junctures. A third linguistic condition required listeners to determine the categorical assignment of a speaker's intention of making a statement or asking a question conveyed through the prosodic structures. The fourth experiment was designed to determine hemispheric lateralisation in processing nonlinguistic prosodic structures. In this experiment, listeners were required to determine the emotional state of a speaker conveyed through the prosodic structures in sentences that contained semantic information which was either congruent or incongruent with the emotional content of the prosodic structures. Results: When subjects were asked to identify lexical stress differences (Experiment 1), syntactically ambiguous sentences (Experiment 2), and questions and statements (Experiment 3) conveyed through prosody, the LHD group demonstrated a significantly poorer performance than the control and RHD groups. When asked to identify emotions conveyed through prosody (Experiment 4), the RHD group demonstrated a significantly poorer performance than the control and LHD groups. Conclusion: These findings support the functional lateralisation theory that proposes a left hemisphere dominance for processing linguistic prosodic structures and a right hemisphere dominance for processing nonlinguistic prosodic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this case study was to demonstrate the successful incorporation of the strengths of process-specific and functional treatment approaches within a therapy programme for a patient with a MTBI. A patient with MTBI and deficits in attention, executive functioning, memory, reasoning and problem solving participated in a 4-month treatment programme. The interactions between the patient's cognitive deficits and problematic activities of daily living were identified. Treatment focused on teaching the patient compensatory strategies to offset the cognitive deficits following a cognitive framework within the context of hierarchically arranged activities of daily living. At the end of this programme, the patient consistently used his compensatory strategies to independently complete activities of daily living that were problematic prior to the receipt of treatment. Implications of this study for the treatment of patients with MTBI suggest that a combined approach is most beneficial in maximizing the recovery of these patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]