Background: The control of the head movements during walking allows for the stabilisation of the optic flow, for a more effective processing of the vestibular system signals, and for the consequent control of equilibrium.

These findings suggest the use of the proposed methodology as a valid alternative to other indirect approaches for 1RM prediction. The mathematical construct is simply based on the definition of the 1RM, and it is fed with subject's muscle strength capacities measured during a specific exercise. Its reliability is, thus, expected to be not affected by those factors that typically jeopardize regression-based approaches.

No abstract

Since the end of February 2020 a severe diffusion of COVID-19 has affected Italy and in particular its northern regions, resulting in a high demand of hospitalizations in particular in the intensive care units (ICUs). Hospitals are suffering the high degree of patients to be treated for respiratory diseases and the majority of the health structures, especially in the north of Italy, are or are at risk of saturation. Therefore, the question whether and to what extent the reduction of hospital beds occurred in the past years has biased the management of the emergency has come to the front in the public debate. In our opinion, to start a robust analysis it is necessary to consider the Italian health system capacity prior to the emergency. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyse the availability of hospital beds across the country as well as to determine their management in terms of complexity and performance of cases treated at regional level. The results of this study underlines that, despite the reduction of beds for the majority of the hospital wards, ICUs availabilities did not change between 2010 and 2017. Moreover, this study confirms that the majority of the Italian regions have a routinely efficient management of their facilities allowing hospitals to treat patients without the risk of having an overabundance of patients and a scarcity of beds. In fact, this analysis shows that, in normal situations, the management of hospital and ICU beds has no critical levels.