The purpose of this pilot study is to examine the effects of Tai Chi Quan, a body-mind harmony exercise, on college students' perceptions of their physical and mental health. A three-month intervention of Tai Chi exercise was administered to college students, and multidimensional physical (PHD) and mental (MHD) health scores were assessed using the SF-36v2 health survey questionnaire before and after the intervention. Thirty college students participated in a 1-hour-long Tai Chi exercise intervention twice a week for 3 months. Each practice session included 10 minutes of breathing and stretching exercises followed by 50 minutes of Tai Chi Quan 24-form practice. PHD including physical function (PF), role physical (RP), bodily pain (BP), general health (GH), and MHD including social function (SF), role mental/emotion function (RE), vitality (VT), perceptions of mental health (MH) were assessed. The normalized scores of each variable and the combined PHD or MHD scores before and after the Tai Chi intervention were examined by paired t-test (p < 0.05). Physical measures of BP and GH, and mental measures of RE, VT and MH were significantly improved after Tai Chi exercise intervention. When the overall PHD or MHD scores were evaluated, the MHD had increased significantly. In conclusion, Tai Chi exercise had positive effects on the self-assessed physical and mental health of college students. Scores on the mental health dimension appeared to be particularly sensitive to change. Colleges/universities might consider offering Tai Chi as a component of their ongoing physical activity programs available to students.

The purpose of this study was to design and validate an instrumented wheel system (IWS) that can measure 3-dimensional (3-D) pushrim forces during racing wheelchair propulsion. Linearity, precision, and percent error were determined for both static and dynamic conditions. For the static condition, the IWS demonstrated a high linearity (0.91

Abstract-We hypothesized that the effects of immediate video feedback (IVF) on training ramp, wheelie, and curb wheelchair skills for persons with spinal cord injury (SCI) would be equivalent to or better than the traditional wheelchair skill training. Participants were manual wheelchair users with recent SCI (thoracic 1-lumbar 1) who were matched (9 pairs) on motor function level, age, and sex and randomly assigned to a control group (conventional training) or an experimental group (IVF training). Participants learned three wheelchair skills and then went through the wheelchair skill competency test, retention test, and transfer test. Paired t-tests were used to examine the differences in training time (minutes), spotter intervention needed (counts), and successful rate in performance between the two groups. A 2 (groups) x 3 (skills) x 3 (tests) repeated-measures analysis of variance and Bonferroni adjustment test were used to examine differences between groups on wheelchair skills and tests. No differences were found between two groups in training times (minutes) on three wheelchair skills (experimental vs control: ramp 14.92 +/-5.80 vs 11.69 +/-7.85, wheelie 17.79 +/-6.03 vs 19.92 +/-13.42, and curb 38.35 +/-23.01 vs 48.59 +/-15.21). This study demonstrated that IVF for training manual wheelchair skills may produce similar results as the conventional training and may be an alternative training method for wheelchair skills.