Sharif Digital Repository

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a common musculoskeletal disorder resulting in altered gait patterns. Uncontrolled manifold (UCM) analysis has been demonstrated as a useful approach for quantitative analysis of motor variability and synergies. The present study aimed to investigate the changes in the kinematic synergy, controlling the center of mass (COM) position while walking on normal and narrow paths in people with KOA compared to asymptomatic participants. In this cross-sectional study, twenty people with mild to moderate KOA and twenty asymptomatic individuals walked at their comfortable preferred speed across normal and narrow paths on a treadmill. The UCM analysis was performed... 

Sit to stand (STS) is one of the most important activities of daily living that is shown to be affected in low back pain (LBP) patients. It requires a fundamental coordination action among all segments (DOFs) of the body in order to control important performance variables such as body's center of mass (CM) within base of support (BOS). In this study, possible differences in joint coordination and variability patterns between chronic LBP and healthy control subjects were investigated during STS task. Eleven adults with nonspecific chronic LBP and 12 healthy controls were recruited in the study. The participants performed the task in 3 exerimental conditions including: rigid surface, open eyes... 

Background: Many studies have been conducted on the changes in the balance capabilities of stroke patients. However, results regarding the effects of dual-task activities on postural control in these patients have been variable. Objective: To evaluate the effects of a short-term memory task on the sway characteristics of stroke patients. Method: Center of pressure (COP) fluctuations were measured in three levels of postural difficulty (rigid surface with closed and open eyes and foamsurface with closed eyes), aswell as two levels of cognitive difficulty (easy and difficult). COP parameters included mean velocity, standard deviation of velocity in both medial-lateral (M.L) and... 

A safe rehabilitation exercise for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries needs to be compatible with the normal knee arthrokinematics to avoid abnormal loading on the joint structures. The objective of this study was to measure the amount of the anterior tibial translation (ATT) of the ACL-deficient knees during selective open and closed kinetic chain exercises. The intact and injured knees of fourteen male subjects with unilateral ACL injury were imaged using uniplanar fluoroscopy, while the subjects performed forward lunge and unloaded/loaded open kinetic knee extension exercises. The ATTs were measured from fluoroscopic images, as the distance between the tibial and femoral reference... 

Proper operation of an engine requires accurate measurement or estimation of the engine's air charge provided to the control unit which reduces both the engine's fuel consumption and the emissions. The volumetric efficiency of the engine is a key variable in computations using the engine control unit to estimate the air charge using the speed-density equation. This paper presents a new approach for real-time estimation of the volumetric efficiency using the sliding-mode methodology. An adaptive sliding-mode observer is proposed which relies on measurements from the engine's conventional sensors. The observer is shown to estimate asymptotically the volumetric efficiency of the engine for... 

Sit to stand (STS) task requires variability of all body segments to achieve the stability of the important control variables (i.e., center of mass (CM) and head positions). In this study, the possible differences in the variability patterns of various body segments were investigated between 11 chronic low back pain (LBP) and 12 control subjects during STS task through two types of variability analyses; first by calculating the variability of seven limb angles, CM and head positions across 15 trials and second by principal component analysis (PCA) of seven limb angles. Participants performed the task at 3 postural difficulty levels: rigid surface, open eyes (RO), rigid surface, close eyes... 

Sit-to-stand (STS) is an important functional task affected by low back pain (LBP). It requires fundamental coordination among all segments of the body to control important performance variables such as body's center of mass (CM) and head positions. This study was conducted to determine whether LBPs could coordinate their multiple joints to achieve the task stability to the same extent as healthy controls. About 11 non-specific chronic LBP and 12 healthy control subjects performed STS task at three postural difficulty levels: rigid surface - open eyes (RO), rigid surface - closed eyes (RC) and narrow surface - closed eyes (NC). Motion variability of seven body segments, CM and head positions... 

In this paper optimization of energy consumption in an electric vehicle is presented. The main idea of this optimization is based on selecting the best gear level in driving the vehicle. Two algorithms for optimization are introduced which are based on fuzzy rules and fuzzy controllers. In first algorithm, fuzzy controller simulates energy consumption in different gear levels, and chooses the optimum gear level. While in second method, fuzzy controller detects the optimum gear level by measuring the vehicle's average speed and acceleration. To investigate the performance of these controllers, a model of TOSAN vehicle is developed and the controllers outputs are checked in simulation of TOSAN... 

In this paper, the forced vibrations of the fractional viscoelastic beam with the Kelvin-Voigt fractional order constitutive relationship is studied. The equation of motion is derived from Newton’s second law and the Galerkin method is used to discretize the equation of motion in to a set of linear ordinary differential equations. For solving the discretized equations, the radial basis functions and Sinc quadrature rule are used. In order to show the effectiveness and accuracy of this method, some test problem are considered, and it is shown that the obtained results are in very good agreement with exact solution. In the following, the proposed numerical solution is applied to exploring the...