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Robot-assisted gait training is effective for walking independence in stroke rehabilitation, the hybrid assistive limb (HAL) is an example. However, gait training with HAL may not be effective for everyone, and it is not clear who is not expected to benefit. Therefore, we aimed to identify the characteristics of stroke patients who have difficulty gaining benefits from gait training with HAL. We conducted a single-institutional retrospective cohort study. The participants were 82 stroke patients who had received gait training with HAL during hospitalization. The dependent variable was the functional ambulation category (FAC) that a measure of gait independence in stroke patients, and five independent [age, National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale, Brunnstrom recovery stage (BRS), days from stroke onset, and functional independence measure total score (cognitive items)] variables were selected from previous studies and analyzed by logistic regression analysis. We evaluated the validity of logistic regression analysis by using several indicators, such as the area under the curve (AUC), and a confusion matrix. Age, days from stroke onset to HAL initiation, and BRS were identified as factors that significantly influenced walking independence through gait training with HAL. The AUC was 0.86. Furthermore, after building a confusion matrix, the calculated binary accuracy, sensitivity (recall), and specificity were 0.80, 0.80, and 0.81, respectively, indicated high accuracy. Our findings confirmed that older age, greater degree of paralysis, and delayed initiation of HAL-assisted training after stroke onset were associated with increased likelihood of walking dependence upon hospital discharge.

Assistive exoskeleton robots are being widely applied in neurorehabilitation to improve upper-limb motor and somatosensory functions. During robot-assisted exercises, the central nervous system appears to highly attend to external information-processing (IP) to efficiently interact with robotic assistance. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unclear. The rostromedial prefrontal cortex (rmPFC) may be the core of the executive resource allocation that generates biases in the allocation of processing resources toward an external IP according to current behavioral demands. Here, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate the cortical activation associated with executive resource allocation during a robot-assisted motor task. During data acquisition, participants performed a right-arm motor task using elbow flexion-extension movements in three different loading conditions: robotic assistive loading (ROB), resistive loading (RES), and non-loading (NON). Participants were asked to strive for kinematic consistency in their movements. A one-way repeated measures analysis of variance and general linear model-based methods were employed to examine task-related activity. We demonstrated that hemodynamic responses in the ventral and dorsal rmPFC were higher during ROB than during NON. Moreover, greater hemodynamic responses in the ventral rmPFC were observed during ROB than during RES. Increased activation in ventral and dorsal rmPFC subregions may be involved in the executive resource allocation that prioritizes external IP during human-robot interactions. In conclusion, these findings provide novel insights regarding the involvement of executive control during a robot-assisted motor task.

In this paper we study non-symplectic automorphisms of odd order on K3 surfaces which are not purely. In particular we shall describe fixed loci of non-symplectic automorphisms of order 15 and 21. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study cyclic quotient singularities given by automorphisms of maximum order on K3 surfaces. In particular, we describe fixed loci of such automorphisms, and provide types of these singularities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study non-symplectic automorphisms of order 6 on K3 surfaces which are not purely. In particular we shall describe their fixed loci. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

K3 surfaces with non-symplectic symmetry of order 3 are classified by open sets of twenty-four complex ball quotients associated to Eisenstein lattices. We show that twenty-two of those moduli spaces are rational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the formation of a high-viscosity wormlikemicelle solution consisting of a mixed aqueous solution containing the cationic surfactant cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) and sodium cinnamate (NaCin) and control of the solution viscosity by photoisomerization of the NaCin. The aqueous CTAB/NaCin solution exhibited higher zeroshear viscosity than a classic wormlike micelle-forming system CTAB/sodium salicylate of the same concentration. UV irradiation of the aqueous CTAB/NaCin wormlike-micelle solution resulted in a remarkable decrease in its viscosity, from 6.6 x 10 to 2.1 x 10-3 Pa s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]