Rehabilitation of stroke survivors has been increasing in importance in recent years with increase in the occurrence of stroke. However, current clinical classification assessment is time-consuming while the result is not accurate and varies across physicians. This paper introduces an IoT-based upper limb rehabilitation assessment system for stroke survivors based on wireless sensing sub-system, data cloud, computing cloud and software based on Android platform. The system can automatically perform objective assessment. It is designed for home rehabilitation as well as for the concept of graded rehabilitation therapy.

We investigated the effects of different fatty acids (FAs) or with different degrees of unsaturation on cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1) induction and protein kinase C (PKC) activity in human hepatoma HepG2 cells. As the degree of unsaturation increased, the cell survival rate decreased for FAs with 18 carbons, but linolenic acid (LNA) or docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) groups were similar even through they have different degrees of unsaturation. Treatment with palmitic acid (PA), oleic acid (OA), linoleic acid (LA), LNA, and DHA resulted in respective cellular FA concentrations of C16:0 (43.1%), C18:1 (18.5%), C18:2 (7.4%), LNA (2.85%), and C22:6 (3.13%), which was highest for the FA that was used as the treatment, indicating that their incorporation within the cell is directly proportional to treatment. After 2 hours of cultivation, the lipid peroxide (LPO) in the DHA group increased 600% compared with control, and was much higher than in the groups treated with the other FAs, with LNA > LA > OA > PA. CYP2E1 induction increased with greater effect as the degree of unsaturation of OA, LA, and DHA increased. PA did not affect PKC activity, but DHA treatment increased PKC activity the most. The effects of LNA and LA were similar, but less than that of DHA, and that of OA was lower still, indicating that activity of PKC is proportional to the degree of unsaturation, and not the configuration of the FA. Increased plasma membrane concentrations of n-3 FA, such as DHA, might exert regulatory effects on PKC by increasing membrane fluidity, causing changes in CYP2E1, elevating levels of LPO, or producing oxidative stress.

This paper analyzes the end-to-end delay of EtherCAT-based control processes that use the events of message frames and global clock for synchronized operation. With the end-to-end delay defined as the time interval between the start of a process cycle and the actual input or output, we develop a holistic delay model for control processes with EtherCAT, by taking into account the time for in-controller processing, message delivery, and slave-local handling. Based on the measurements from a real EtherCAT control system, we discuss the average and deviation of the process delay as we vary the number of slaves and process cycle time. The experiment results show that the output delays are mainly increased by the average controller delay, whereas the input delays are more affected by the deviation rather than the average of the controller delay. Our in-depth analysis on the controller reveals that the DMA (Direct Memory Access) overhead chiefly enlarges the controller delay for increasing number of slaves, while task release jitter is the main cause of the increased delay for longer cycle time. The presented delay model and evaluation results can be essentially used for the design of EtherCAT-based automation that requires highly synchronized operations, such as for coordinated motion and high-precision data sensing.

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