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Sarcopenia is a comprehensive degenerative disease with the progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass with age, accompanied by the loss of muscle strength and muscle dysfunction. Individuals with unmanaged sarcopenia may experience adverse outcomes. Periodically monitoring muscle function to detect muscle degeneration caused by sarcopenia and treating degenerated muscles is essential. We proposed a digital biomarker measurement technique using surface electromyography (sEMG) with electrical stimulation and wearable device to conveniently monitor muscle function at home. When motor neurons and muscle fibers are electrically stimulated, stimulated muscle contraction signals (SMCSs) can be obtained using an sEMG sensor. As motor neuron activation is important for muscle contraction and strength, their action potentials for electrical stimulation represent the muscle function. Thus, the SMCSs are closely related to muscle function, presumptively. Using the SMCSs data, a feature vector concatenating spectrogram-based features and deep learning features extracted from a convolutional neural network model using continuous wavelet transform images was used as the input to train a regression model for measuring the digital biomarker. To verify muscle function measurement technique, we recruited 98 healthy participants aged 20–60 years including 48 [49%] men who volunteered for this study. The Pearson correlation coefficient between the label and model estimates was 0.89, suggesting that the proposed model can robustly estimate the label using SMCSs, with mean error and standard deviation of -0.06 and 0.68, respectively. In conclusion, measuring muscle function using the proposed system that involves SMCSs is feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Physical frailty and sarcopenia are geriatric syndromes associated with adverse health outcomes. However, the common and different conditions associated with physical frailty and sarcopenia remain unclear. This study aimed to compare the clinical characteristics of older adults with physical frailty and sarcopenia. Methods: This cross‐sectional study analyzed 2028 community‐dwelling older adults, aged 70–84 years (mean age 75.9 ± 4.0 years; 50.1% men). Physical frailty was defined using the Fried frailty phenotype, whereas sarcopenia was defined using the Asian Working Group for Sarcopenia 2014 and 2019 criteria. Results: The prevalence of physical frailty was 5.5%, whereas that of sarcopenia, using the Asian Working Group for Sarcopenia 2014 and 2019, was 9.1% and 17.5%, respectively. The concordance of physical frailty with sarcopenia was higher in the Asian Working Group for Sarcopenia 2019 criteria than in 2014. Frail‐only participants had a higher incidence of disability, cognitive dysfunction, poor self‐perceived health, and depressive symptoms than the sarcopenic‐only participants. Frail‐and‐sarcopenic participants showed a lower body mass index (≥23 kg/m2) than frail‐only participants. Furthermore, in frail‐and‐sarcopenic participants, recurrent falls (16.9% vs 5.5%) were higher than in the neither‐frail‐nor‐sarcopenic participants; falls with fracture (11.5% vs 1.7%) and fear of falling (59.0% vs 36.7%) were higher in frail‐and‐sarcopenic participants than in sarcopenic‐only participants. Conclusions: This study showed significant differences between physical frailty and sarcopenia among community‐dwelling older adults. Older adults with physical frailty and sarcopenia were more likely to have higher fall‐related outcomes than the others. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2022; 22: 42–49. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There have been previous studies on the relationship between periodontitis and peri-implantitis, but limited information is available on how periodontitis affects osseointegration and wound healing of newly placed dental implants adjacent to natural teeth. The objective of the present experiment is to evaluate healing around dental implants adjacent to teeth with untreated experimental periodontitis.Methods: The study included six male beagle dogs. Scaling and plaque control procedures were performed on three dogs (control group). In the other three dogs (experimental group), retraction cords and ligature wires were placed subgingivally around all premolars and the first molars. Induced experimental periodontitis was confirmed after 3 months. Each control or experimental group was divided into two subgroups depending on the timing of implant placement (immediate/delayed). Twelve dental implants (two implants for each dog) were placed immediately, and the other 12 dental implants (two implants for each dog) were placed 2 months after extraction. The animals were sacrificed 2 months after implant placement. Histologic and histometric analyses were performed.Results: Four implants (three from the immediate placement group and one from the delayed placement group) failed in the experimental group. There were significant differences in the percentage of bone-to-implant contact and marginal bone volume density between the control and experimental groups. Both parameters were significantly lower in the experimental group than in the control group (P <0.05). There was a tendency toward more marginal bone loss in the experimental group than the control group.Conclusions: Immediate placement of implants is associated with a higher failure rate compared with delayed placement. Untreated experimental periodontitis was correlated with compromised osseointegration in the implants with delayed placement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a 10-channel, 120 nW/channel, reconfigurable capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) enabling sub- μW wearable sensing applications. The proposed multi-channel architecture supports 10 channels with a shared reconfigurable 6-bit differential analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The reconfigurable nature of the CDC enables adaptive sensing range and sensing speed based on the target application. Furthermore, the architecture performs both on/off-chip parasitic correction and baseline calibration to measure the change in capacitance ( ∆C), excluding baseline and parasitic capacitances. The experimental results show the measurement range of ∆C are 5.34 pF for 1x sensitivity and 1.8 pF for 3x sensitivity respectively. The capacitive divider-based architecture excludes power-hungry operational trans-impedance amplifiers for capacitance to voltage conversion, and the architecture supports programmable channel access to activate or deactivate each channel independently. The random interrupt protection logic avoids any broken sample or data error in a sampling window. Additionally, the channel monitoring logic helps keep track of specific channel information. The measured silicon result shows a total power consumption of 1.2 μW for 1.6 kHz sampling frequency when driven by a 32 kHz clock, which is 8.6x less than prior works. The CDC is also tested with DMMP (dimethyl-methylphosphonate) gas sensor in gas chromatography (GC). Implemented in 65 nm CMOS process, the 10-channel CDC occupies 0.251 mm 2 of active area (0.0251 mm 2 /Ch).

Early detection of the risk of sarcopenia at younger ages is crucial for implementing preventive strategies, fostering healthy muscle development, and minimizing the negative impact of sarcopenia on health and aging. In this study, we propose a novel sarcopenia risk detection technique that combines surface electromyography (sEMG) signals and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) with machine learning algorithms. First, we recorded and preprocessed sEMG data from both healthy and at-risk individuals during various physical activities, including normal walking, fast walking, performing a standard squat, and performing a wide squat. Next, electromyography (EMG) features were extracted from a normalized EMG and its intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) were obtained through EMD. Subsequently, a minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) feature selection method was employed to identify the most influential subset of features. Finally, the performances of state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) classifiers were evaluated using a leave-one-subject-out cross-validation technique, and the effectiveness of the classifiers for sarcopenia risk classification was assessed through various performance metrics. The proposed method shows a high accuracy, with accuracy rates of 0.88 for normal walking, 0.89 for fast walking, 0.81 for a standard squat, and 0.80 for a wide squat, providing reliable identification of sarcopenia risk during physical activities. Beyond early sarcopenia risk detection, this sEMG-EMD-ML system offers practical values for assessing muscle function, muscle health monitoring, and managing muscle quality for an improved daily life and well-being.

Stroke-related disabilities cause poor physical performance, especially among older adults, and can lead to sarcopenia. Functional electrical stimulation (FES) has been used to improve physical performance in individuals with neurological disorders and increase muscle mass and strength to counteract muscle atrophy. This review covers the principles, underlying mechanisms, and therapeutic effects of FES on physical performance and skeletal muscle function in post-stroke older adults. We found that FES restored weakened dorsiflexor and hip abductor strength during the swing and stance phases of gait, respectively, to help support weight-bearing and upright posture and facilitate static and dynamic balance in this population. FES may also be effective in improving muscle mass and strength to prevent muscle atrophy. However, previous studies on this topic in post-stroke older adults are scarce, and further studies are needed to confirm this supposition.

Elderly health monitoring, rehabilitation training, and sport supervision could benefit from continuous assessment of joint angle, and angular velocity to identify the joint movement patterns. However, most of the measurement systems are designed based on special kinematic sensors to estimate angular velocities. The study aims to measure the lower limb joint angular velocity based on a 2D vision camera system during squat and walking on treadmill action using deep convolution neural network (CNN) architecture. Experiments were conducted on 12 healthy adults, and six digital cameras were used to capture the videos of the participant actions in lateral and frontal view. The normalized cross-correlation (Cc norm ) analysis was performed to obtain a degree of symmetry of the ground truth and estimated angular velocity waveform patterns. Mean Cc norm for angular velocity estimation by deep CNN model has higher than 0.90 in walking on the treadmill and 0.89 in squat action. Furthermore, joint-wise angular velocities at the hip, knee, and ankle joints were observed and compared. The proposed system gets higher estimation performance under the lateral view and the frontal view of the camera. This study potentially eliminates the requirement of wearable sensors and proves the applicability of using video-based system to measure joint angular velocities during squat and walking on a treadmill actions.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently endorsed the proposal for a Decade of Healthy Ageing (2020-2030). The WHO defines "healthy aging" as "the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables wellbeing in older age." Among the strategies for the Decade of Healthy Ageing, the WHO has suggested enhancing intrinsic capacity, promoting functional ability, and implementing the Integrated Care for Older People (ICOPE) package. The WHO has defined steps for ICOPE evaluation and scale-up and is performing a prospective study in 2-3 countries (low and middle income, high income) to test its feasibility in 2021-2022 and a multinational randomized study to validate its clinical efficacy and effectiveness in 2022-2024. Intrinsic capacity and frailty represent two faces of the same coin, with one indicating the reserves of the individual and the other indicating the deficits that accumulate with age. The Integrated Care of Older Patients with Frailty in Primary Care (ICOOP&#95;Frail) study is the first integrated care program for frailty or functional decline in primary care in Korea. The results suggest that the ICOOP&#95;Frail study can be utilized as a reference for ICOPE studies in Korea or at least to provide important findings for the forthcoming ICOPE implementation study in Korea.