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A study has been performed to investigate the physical effects of lumbar spinal supports. Two groups were studied, a group of normal male subjects and a group of male low back pain patients. Five different spinal supports were investigated and their effects upon the skin temperature, spinal movements and intra-abdominal pressures of these individuals were examined. The results show surprisingly similar patterns for the widely varying designs of support. The findings also suggest that the longer term wearing of a spinal support results in a degree of physical dependence. The results of this study are aimed at improving the prescription and use of spinal supports in the treatment of low back pain.

This paper presents an inconsistency tolerant semantics for the Description Logic ALC called Preferential ALC (p-ALC ). A p-ALC knowledge base is comprised of defeasible and non-defeasible axioms. The defeasible ABox and TBox are labelled with confidence weights that could reflect an axiom's provenance. Entailment is defined through the notion of preferred interpretations which minimise the total weight of the inconsistent axioms. We introduce a modified ALC tableau algorithm in which the open branches give rise to the preferred interpretations, and show that it can compute p-ALC entailment by refutation. The modified algorithm is implemented as an incremental answer set program (ASP) that exploits optimisation to capture preferred interpretations of p-ALC .

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