No abstract

Individual‐based morphological brain networks built from T1‐weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reflect synchronous maturation intensities between anatomical regions at the individual level. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a socio‐cognitive and neurodevelopmental disorder with high neuroanatomical heterogeneity, but the specific patterns of morphological networks in ASD remain largely unexplored at the individual level. In this study, individual‐based morphological networks were constructed by using high‐resolution structural MRI data from 40 young children with ASD (age range: 2–8 years) and 38 age‐, gender‐, and handedness‐matched typically developing children (TDC). Measurements were recorded as threefold. Results showed that compared with TDC, young children with ASD exhibited lower values of small‐worldness (i.e., σ) of individual‐level morphological brain networks, increased morphological connectivity in cortico‐striatum‐thalamic‐cortical (CSTC) circuitry, and decreased morphological connectivity in the cortico‐cortical network. In addition, morphological connectivity abnormalities can predict the severity of social communication deficits in young children with ASD, thus confirming an associational impact at the behavioral level. These findings suggest that the morphological brain network in the autistic developmental brain is inefficient in segregating and distributing information. The results also highlight the crucial role of abnormal morphological connectivity patterns in the socio‐cognitive deficits of ASD and support the possible use of the aberrant developmental patterns of morphological brain networks in revealing new clinically‐relevant biomarkers for ASD.

In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for portable power sources as people are required to carry more equipment for occupational, military, or recreational purposes. The energy harvesting backpack that moves relative to the human body, could capture kinetic energy from human walking and convert vertical oscillation into the rotational motion of the generators to generate electricity. In our previous work, a light-weight tube-like energy harvester (TL harvester) and a traditional frequency-tuneable backpack-based energy harvester (FT harvester) were proposed. In this paper, we discuss the power generation performance of the two types of energy harvesters and the energy performance of human loaded walking, while carrying energy harvesting backpacks, based on two different spring-mass-damper models. Testing revealed that the electrical power in the experiments showed similar trends to the simulation results, but the calculated electrical power and the net metabolic power were higher than that of the experiments. Moreover, the total cost of harvesting (TCOH), defined as additional metabolic power in watt required to generate 1 W of electrical power, could be negative, which indicated that there is a chance to generate 6.11 W of electricity without increasing the metabolic cost while carrying energy harvesting backpacks.

Backpacks are essential for travel but carrying a load during a long journey can easily cause muscle fatigue and joint injuries. Previous studies have suggested that suspended backpacks can effectively reduce the energy cost while carrying loads. Researchers have found that adjusting the stiffness of a suspended backpack can optimize its performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a stiffness-adjustable suspended backpack; the system stiffness can be adjusted to suitable values at different speeds. The stiffness of the suspended backpack with a 5-kg load was designed to be 690 N/m for a speed of 4.5 km/h, and it was adjusted to 870 and 1050 N/m at speeds of 5.5 and 6.5 km/h, respectively. The goal of this study was to determine how carrying a stiffness-adjustable suspended backpack affected performance while carrying a load. Six healthy participants participated in experiments where they wore two backpacks under three conditions: the adjustable-stiffness suspended backpack condition (S_A), the unadjustable-stiffness suspended backpack condition (S_UA), and the ordinary backpack condition (ORB). Our results showed that the peak accelerations, muscle activities, and peak ground reaction forces in the S_A condition were reduced effectively by adjusting the stiffness to adapt to different walking speeds; this adjustment decreased the metabolic cost by 4.21 ± 1.21% and 2.68 ± 0.88% at 5.5 km/h and 4.27 ± 1.35% and 3.38± 1.31% at 6.5 km/h compared to the ORB and S_UA, respectively.

No abstract