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Journal of Neuroengineering and... Jun 2024This scoping review aims to explore published literature testing Virtual Reality (VR) interventions for improving upper limb motor performance in children and... (Review)
Review
Evaluating the impact of virtual reality game training on upper limb motor performance in children and adolescents with developmental coordination disorder: a scoping review using the ICF framework.
OBJECTIVE
This scoping review aims to explore published literature testing Virtual Reality (VR) interventions for improving upper limb motor performance in children and adolescents with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). Our primary focus was on the types of VR systems used and the measurement tools employed within the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health Children and Youth Version (ICF-CY) domains in these studies.
METHODS
A comprehensive search of six electronic databases up to 11th January 2024 was conducted using predefined terms. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to determine study eligibility, with two authors independently assessing titles, abstracts, and full-text articles.
RESULTS
Out of 788 potential studies, 14 met the eligibility criteria. Studies predominantly utilized non-immersive VR (nVR) systems, for example, commercial platforms such as Nintendo Wii. Most interventions targeted general motor coordination or balance, with only four studies specifically focusing on upper limb motor performance. The Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 was the predominant assessment tool. However, the use of game scores and trial durations raised concerns about the accuracy of assessments. The majority of studies reported no significant improvement in upper limb motor performance following VR interventions, though some noted improvements in specific tasks or overall outcomes.
CONCLUSION
The findings suggest that, while nVR interventions are being explored for paediatric motor rehabilitation, their impact on enhancing upper limb motor performance in children with DCD is unclear. The variability in intervention designs, outcome measures, and the predominant focus on general motor skills rather than specific upper limb improvements highlight the need for more targeted research in this area.
IMPACT
This review underscores the importance of developing precise and clinically relevant measurement tools in a broader range of VR technologies to optimize the use of VR in therapy for children with DCD. Future research should aim for more rigorous study designs and emerging immersive technologies to maximize therapeutic benefits.
Topics: Humans; Motor Skills Disorders; Child; Adolescent; Upper Extremity; Virtual Reality; Video Games; International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health; Motor Skills; Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
PubMed: 38840217
DOI: 10.1186/s12984-024-01393-y -
Frontiers in Public Health 2024The growth of certain human brain structures peaks at early ages, and complex motor interventions could positively facilitate this process. This study aims to offer an... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis
Motor development-focused exercise training enhances gross motor skills more effectively than ordinary physical activity in healthy preschool children: an updated meta-analysis.
PURPOSE
The growth of certain human brain structures peaks at early ages, and complex motor interventions could positively facilitate this process. This study aims to offer an updated meta-analysis regarding the effectiveness of motor development-focused exercise training on gross motor skills in preschool children.
METHODS
We searched English- and Chinese-language electronic databases as of March 2024. The main eligibility criteria were as follows: participants were healthy children aged 3 to 6 years old, and the experimental design was a randomized controlled trial, with the control arm participating in either free play or ordinary physical education curriculum. We conducted a Hartung-Knapp random-effects meta-analysis of the standardized mean difference for locomotor, object control, or gross motor quotient.
RESULTS
The search identified 23 eligible studies, of which approximately 75% were considered to have a low risk of bias. Compared with active control, exercise training showed a large to very large effect size. Cohen's d values were 1.13, 1.55, and 1.53 for locomotor, object control, and gross motor quotient, respectively. From a probabilistic viewpoint, these effect sizes correspond to events that are "very likely to occur" and "almost sure to occur." Due to variations in intervention programs, all outcome measures showed high heterogeneity.
CONCLUSION
This updated meta-analysis offers a realistic synthesis of the current evidence, leading to the conclusion that targeted motor skill exercise training can almost certainly enhance preschool children's gross motor skills. Practical implications are discussed regarding the refinement of the instructional framework and the dissemination of these findings in preschool settings.
Topics: Humans; Child, Preschool; Motor Skills; Exercise; Child; Child Development; Male; Female; Physical Education and Training; Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
PubMed: 38835603
DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1414152 -
PloS One 2024With the rapid development of intelligent connected vehicles, there is an increasing demand for hardware facilities and onboard systems of driver assistance systems....
With the rapid development of intelligent connected vehicles, there is an increasing demand for hardware facilities and onboard systems of driver assistance systems. Currently, most vehicles are constrained by the hardware resources of onboard systems, which mainly process single-task and single-sensor data. This poses a significant challenge in achieving complex panoramic driving perception technology. While the panoramic driving perception algorithm YOLOP has achieved outstanding performance in multi-task processing, it suffers from poor adaptability of feature map pooling operations and loss of details during downsampling. To address these issues, this paper proposes a panoramic driving perception fusion algorithm based on multi-task learning. The model training involves the introduction of different loss functions and a series of processing steps for lidar point cloud data. Subsequently, the perception information from lidar and vision sensors is fused to achieve synchronized processing of multi-task and multi-sensor data, thereby effectively improving the performance and reliability of the panoramic driving perception system. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in multi-task processing, the BDD100K dataset is used. The results demonstrate that, compared to the YOLOP model, the multi-task learning network performs better in lane detection, drivable area detection, and vehicle detection tasks. Specifically, the lane detection accuracy improves by 11.6%, the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) for drivable area detection increases by 2.1%, and the mean Average Precision at 50% IoU (mAP50) for vehicle detection improves by 3.7%.
Topics: Algorithms; Humans; Automobile Driving; Task Performance and Analysis
PubMed: 38833435
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0304691 -
African Journal of Primary Health Care... May 2024Childhood is an important transitional period for the development of healthy physical activity (PA) behaviours, so it is important to understand its impact on a...
BACKGROUND
Childhood is an important transitional period for the development of healthy physical activity (PA) behaviours, so it is important to understand its impact on a healthy lifestyle.
AIM
This study aimed to determine the influences of sex, socioeconomic status (SES) and body composition (BC) on the relationships between PA, motor skills, motor- and health-related physical fitness in 5-8-year-olds.
SETTING
Participants were a subsample consisting of 299 children (150 boys, 149 girls, mean age 6.83 ± 0.96 years) from the Exercise, Arterial Modulation and Nutrition in Youth South Africa study (ExAMIN Youth SA).
METHODS
Anthropometric measures, health-related physical fitness (HRPF), motor-related physical fitness (MRPF), objectively measured PA and demographic information were determined.
RESULTS
Only 66% achieved the recommended 60 min of daily moderate vigorous physical activity (MVPA) with 19% classified as having unhealthy body composition (11% overweight, 8% obese). Fat-free mass and SES revealed small-to-moderate influences on the relationship between MVPA, standing broad jump (SBJ; r = 0.32), predicted VO2max (r = 0.28) and beep levels (r = 0.22). For MRPF, the quality of running (r = 0.12) and balancing were associated with MVPA. Adjusting for sex, BC and SES in the relationship between PA with HRPF and MRPF, reductions in most correlations were observed.
CONCLUSION
Moderate vigorous physical activity levels were positively associated with HRPF, MRPF and some motor skills in 5-8-year-olds. Socioeconomic status (lower parental income, employment and education negatively influenced the association between MVPA and fitness [beeps, SBJ, O2max]).Contribution: This study provides knowledge with regard to the use of accelerometer for baseline data for PA, MRPF, HRPF as well as motor skills in South African children.
Topics: Humans; Female; Male; Physical Fitness; Motor Skills; Child; South Africa; Exercise; Child, Preschool; Body Composition; Social Class; Sex Factors
PubMed: 38832375
DOI: 10.4102/phcfm.v16i1.4258 -
Accident; Analysis and Prevention Sep 2024Paramedics face various unconventional and secondary task demands while driving ambulances, leading to significant cognitive load, especially during lights-and-sirens...
Paramedics face various unconventional and secondary task demands while driving ambulances, leading to significant cognitive load, especially during lights-and-sirens responses. Previous research suggests that high cognitive load negatively affects driving performance, increasing the risk of accidents, particularly for inexperienced drivers. The current study investigated the impact of anticipatory treatment planning on cognitive load during emergency driving, as assessed through the use of a driving simulator. We recruited 28 non-paramedic participants to complete a simulated baseline drive with no task and a cognitive load manipulation using the 1-back task. We also recruited 18 paramedicine students who completed a drive while considering two cases they were travelling to: cardiac arrest and infant seizure, representing varying difficulty in required treatment. The results indicated that both cases imposed considerable cognitive load, as indicated by NASA Task Load Index responses, comparable to the 1-back task and significantly higher than driving with no load. These findings suggest that contemplating cases and treatment plans may impact the safety of novice paramedics driving ambulances for emergency response. Further research should explore the influence of experience and the presence of a second individual in the vehicle to generalise to broader emergency response driving contexts.
Topics: Humans; Male; Female; Automobile Driving; Adult; Cognition; Young Adult; Seizures; Computer Simulation; Allied Health Personnel; Ambulances; Infant; Emergency Treatment; Task Performance and Analysis; Paramedicine
PubMed: 38830295
DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2024.107646 -
Human Brain Mapping Jun 2024Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) is a disorder characterised by motor and vocal tics, which may represent habitual actions as a result of enhanced learning of...
Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) is a disorder characterised by motor and vocal tics, which may represent habitual actions as a result of enhanced learning of associations between stimuli and responses (S-R). In this study, we investigated how adults with GTS and healthy controls (HC) learn two types of regularities in a sequence: statistics (non-adjacent probabilities) and rules (predefined order). Participants completed a visuomotor sequence learning task while EEG was recorded. To understand the neurophysiological underpinnings of these regularities in GTS, multivariate pattern analyses on the temporally decomposed EEG signal as well as sLORETA source localisation method were conducted. We found that people with GTS showed superior statistical learning but comparable rule-based learning compared to HC participants. Adults with GTS had different neural representations for both statistics and rules than HC adults; specifically, adults with GTS maintained the regularity representations longer and had more overlap between them than HCs. Moreover, over different time scales, distinct fronto-parietal structures contribute to statistical learning in the GTS and HC groups. We propose that hyper-learning in GTS is a consequence of the altered sensitivity to encode complex statistics, which might lead to habitual actions.
Topics: Humans; Tourette Syndrome; Male; Adult; Female; Electroencephalography; Young Adult; Learning; Psychomotor Performance; Middle Aged; Probability Learning
PubMed: 38826009
DOI: 10.1002/hbm.26719 -
Scientific Reports Jun 2024We describe an approach aimed at helping artificial intelligence develop theory of mind of their human teammates to support team interactions. We show how this can be...
We describe an approach aimed at helping artificial intelligence develop theory of mind of their human teammates to support team interactions. We show how this can be supported through the provision of quantifiable, machine-readable, a priori information about the human team members to an agent. We first show how our profiling approach can capture individual team member characteristic profiles that can be constructed from sparse data and provided to agents to support the development of artificial theory of mind. We then show how it captures features of team composition that may influence team performance. We document this through an experiment examining factors influencing the performance of ad-hoc teams executing a complex team coordination task when paired with an artificial social intelligence (ASI) teammate. We report the relationship between the individual and team characteristics and measures related to task performance and self-reported perceptions of the ASI. The results show that individual and emergent team profiles were able to characterize features of the team that predicted behavior and explain differences in perceptions of ASI. Further, the features of these profiles may interact differently when teams work with human versus ASI advisors. Most strikingly, our analyses showed that ASI advisors had a strong positive impact on low potential teams such that they improved the performance of those teams across mission outcome measures. We discuss these findings in the context of developing intelligent technologies capable of social cognition and engage in collaborative behaviors that improve team effectiveness.
Topics: Humans; Artificial Intelligence; Theory of Mind; Male; Female; Cooperative Behavior; Adult; Task Performance and Analysis
PubMed: 38825652
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-63122-8 -
NeuroImage Jul 2024Executive functions are essential for adaptive behavior. One executive function is the so-called 'interference control' or conflict monitoring another one is inhibitory...
Executive functions are essential for adaptive behavior. One executive function is the so-called 'interference control' or conflict monitoring another one is inhibitory control (i.e., action restraint and action cancelation). Recent evidence suggests an interplay of these processes, which is conceptually relevant given that newer conceptual frameworks imply that nominally different action/response control processes are explainable by a small set of cognitive and neurophysiological processes. The existence of such overarching neural principles has as yet not directly been examined. In the current study, we therefore use EEG tensor decomposition methods, to look into possible common neurophysiological signatures underlying conflict-modulated action restraint and action cancelation as mechanism underlying response inhibition. We show how conflicts differentially modulate action restraint and action cancelation processes and delineate common and distinct neural processes underlying this interplay. Concerning the spatial information modulations are similar in terms of an importance of processes reflected by parieto-occipital electrodes, suggesting that attentional selection processes play a role. Especially theta and alpha activity seem to play important roles. The data also show that tensor decomposition is sensitive to the manner of task implementation, thereby suggesting that switch probability/transitional probabilities should be taken into consideration when choosing tensor decomposition as analysis method. The study provides a blueprint of how to use tensor decomposition methods to delineate common and distinct neural mechanisms underlying action control functions using EEG data.
Topics: Humans; Electroencephalography; Conflict, Psychological; Male; Executive Function; Female; Adult; Young Adult; Brain; Inhibition, Psychological; Psychomotor Performance
PubMed: 38825216
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2024.120667 -
Cognition Aug 2024Perceptual decision-making often lacks explicit feedback, making confidence in our choices pivotal for guiding subsequent actions. Recent studies have highlighted the...
Perceptual decision-making often lacks explicit feedback, making confidence in our choices pivotal for guiding subsequent actions. Recent studies have highlighted the role of motor responses in modulating decision confidence. Two competing mechanisms have been proposed to elucidate this phenomenon. The "fluency hypothesis" posits that the ease and smoothness of executing a motor response can serve as a cue to enhance retrospective confidence. Conversely, the "monitoring hypothesis" suggests that the extent of action monitoring during response selection may boost retrospective confidence, with heightened monitoring potentially offsetting response fluency. We conducted a pre-registered experiment to directly test these hypotheses. Participants engaged in a perceptual task involving the discrimination of Gabor patch orientation. Perceptual responses required high or low motor precision, manipulated by the size of target circles that participants had to reach with the computer mouse to provide a response. Contrary to the "fluency hypothesis", our results showed that, in trials requiring higher precision (utilizing small circles), participants reported higher confidence levels compared to trials with less demanding responses (involving larger circles). Importantly, this increase in confidence did not coincide with any change in perceptual accuracy. These findings align with the "monitoring hypothesis," suggesting that the degree of action monitoring during response execution can indeed influence retrospective decision confidence.
Topics: Humans; Decision Making; Adult; Young Adult; Psychomotor Performance; Female; Male; Motor Activity; Metacognition
PubMed: 38824695
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105832 -
Applied Ergonomics Sep 2024Floor inclination can alter hand force production, and lower limb kinetics, affecting control operations, and threatening operator safety in various domains, such as...
Floor inclination can alter hand force production, and lower limb kinetics, affecting control operations, and threatening operator safety in various domains, such as aviation, naval, construction industry, or agriculture. This study investigates the effects of different floor inclinations, on handle push or pull force production. Participants performed maximal isometric contraction tasks requiring to exert a maximal voluntary force either by pulling or pushing a handle, at different floor inclinations from -30° to +30° about the transverse and longitudinal axes. Maximal hand force and Ground Reaction Forces about both feet were recorded. The results revealed non-equivalent variations in hand and feet responses as a function of inclination angle. Specifically, there was a significant reduction in handle push-pull force production, up to 70% (p < 0.001) for extreme inclinations, around both axes. This study provides critical data for design engineers, highlighting the challenge of production forces at steep angles.
Topics: Humans; Male; Biomechanical Phenomena; Adult; Isometric Contraction; Upper Extremity; Young Adult; Floors and Floorcoverings; Female; Ergonomics; Task Performance and Analysis; Hand; Foot; Equipment Design; Hand Strength
PubMed: 38823210
DOI: 10.1016/j.apergo.2024.104322