Little Girl Boy Dad Vibro Vibro School
Krysta Dewaard
The Center for Aluminum Technology is a partnership involving the aluminum industries, the Kentucky Economic Development Cabinet, the U.S. Department of Energy, and UK. The mission of the center is to provide industry with trained personnel, new knowledge and emerging technology know-how needed to be globally competitive in the 21st century. The multidisciplinary research center trains undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students to provide leadership in aluminum technology, develops programs in aluminum technology for non-degree students in conjunction with community colleges and technical schools, and provides research on the fabrication and use of aluminum. The center enlists the skills of researchers from a variety of disciplines, including materials engineering, chemical engineering, mathematics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering.
The central campus Electron Microscopy Center, located in the Advanced Science and Technology Commercialization Center (ASTeCC), houses a suite of instruments for state-of-the-art materials characterization. A variable-pressure scanning electron microscope (SEM) is outfitted with a light-element energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDS) and a back- scattered diffraction camera for orientation imaging microscopy (OIM). A field-emission SEM is available for ultra-high resolution and low-voltage imaging. The facility offers two transmission electron microscopes, one with a LaB6 gun and the other with a field-emission gun; both TEMs are outfitted with light-element EDS detectors, and the field-emission TEM has an electron energy-loss spectrometer and imaging filter. A scanning probe microscope, which can be outfitted with heating, cooling or liquid cell stages, is also available. Instrument users are trained and assisted by facility staff.
The Sustainable Manufacturing Research Program brings together faculty from across the College of Engineering, from other UK colleges and centers, and from universities in the U.S. and a dozen foreign countries. The goal is to pursue multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research projects intended to help manufacturing achieve long-term profitability while offering societal benefits and without harm to the environment or to the needs of future generations. Researchers work closely with industry to ensure the relevance and practicability of the projects.
Faculty teams are currently engaged in work on modeling and optimization of sustainable manufacturing processes covering machining, forming and brazing operations, product and process design for sustainability, sustainable supply chain operations, sustainability enhancement in biomedical implants, dry, near-dry and cryogenic machining. Projects are funded by the US Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, and manufacturing companies such as Toyota, Boeing, Semicon Associates and Caterpillar. The sustainable manufacturing research group is actively involved in research collaboration with a wide variety of defense and commercial manufacturing organizations through the Next Generation Manufacturing Technology Initiative (NGMTI).
The Vibro-Acoustics Consortium is a group of companies who support the noise and vibration related research at the University of Kentucky. The objective of the research is to assist the companies in the understanding and use of vibro-acoustic simulation and experimental methods. The research group is well-known for their work in muffler and silencer, acoustic material, simulation, and transfer path analysis research. The vibro-acoustics laboratory has excellent facilities including a 60 square meter hemi-anechoic chamber and state-of-the-art simulation software (including Siemens Virtual.Lab, MSC Actran, and ESI VA-One), and test equipment. Consortium projects are designed to be practical, short term, and beneficial to the full membership. There are two primary meetings each year in the spring and fall as well as several satellite meetings. Meetings are excellent opportunities to network with other members and have access to excellent graduate students.
The Power and Energy Institute of Kentucky (PEIK) at University of Kentucky (UK) attracts and educates the next generation of power and energy engineers. Established in 2010 with multi-million dollar support from the Department of Energy (DOE), PEIK successfully continues its activities with generous support from UK, industry, utilities, and private donors. PEIK has a revitalized nationally-acclaimed curriculum in power and energy with hundreds of annual course enrolments and issues undergraduate and graduate certificates. Research on power and energy topics, including sustainable and efficient power systems and electronics, energy storage, smart grids and buildings, and others, as well as wide outreach and collaboration with the regional and professional community are an integral part of PEIK's mission.
Advancement of Unmanned Systems technologies is the primary goal of the USRC. In addition to sharing resources for increasing statewide industry awareness and understanding national directions and policies, the USRC partners faculty, students and businesses to focus on development and performance evaluation of systems, platforms, components, sensors, and software.
As one of only a small number of academically based Centers of Membrane Science, the UK center has already received international recognition as a focal point of research among biological and synthetic membrane experts. The center faculty from the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Pharmacy, Agriculture, Medicine, and Human Environmental Systems comprise multidisciplinary research teams who combine to develop new areas of integrative membrane research and to respond to intriguing challenges of membrane sciences and technology.
The Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI) is a multidisciplinary center for informatics research. The Institute translates data into knowledge to improve human health and effectively uses the latest technology and tools for the advancement of biological sciences. The IBI promotes translational team science and engages the entire campus to develop and grow informatics and data science training programs, share research and data infrastructure, and enable technology innovation.
This study examined the trainability of the proprioceptive sense and explored the relationship between proprioception and motor learning. With vision blocked, human learners had to perform goal-directed wrist movements relying solely on proprioceptive/haptic cues to reach several haptically specified targets. One group received additional somatosensory movement error feedback in form of vibro-tactile cues applied to the skin of the forearm. We used a haptic robotic device for the wrist and implemented a 3-day training regimen that required learners to make spatially precise goal-directed wrist reaching movements without vision. We assessed whether training improved the acuity of the wrist joint position sense. In addition, we checked if sensory learning generalized to the motor domain and improved spatial precision of wrist tracking movements that were not trained. The main findings of the study are: First, proprioceptive acuity of the wrist joint position sense improved after training for the group that received the combined proprioceptive/haptic and vibro-tactile feedback (VTF). Second, training had no impact on the spatial accuracy of the untrained tracking task. However, learners who had received VTF significantly reduced their reliance on haptic guidance feedback when performing the untrained motor task. That is, concurrent VTF was highly salient movement feedback and obviated the need for haptic feedback. Third, VTF can be also provided by the limb not involved in the task. Learners who received VTF to the contralateral limb equally benefitted. In conclusion, somatosensory training can significantly enhance proprioceptive acuity within days when learning is coupled with vibro-tactile sensory cues that provide feedback about movement errors. The observable sensory improvements in proprioception facilitates motor learning and such learning may generalize to the sensorimotor control of the untrained motor tasks. The implications of these findings for neurorehabilitation are discussed.
Copyright: 2016 Cuppone et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
There is a growing interest in understanding the functional link between proprioception and motor control and its role in fostering neural plasticity through learning [14]. Increasing evidence indicates that learning related changes are bidirectional. That is, proprioceptive function may be enhanced after learning a motor task [15] or, vice versa, proprioceptive sensory training may improve motor performance [16]. With respect to enhancing the proprioceptive senses, the term proprioceptive training has been used to describe interventions that seek to improve proprioceptive function. It focuses on the use of somatosensory signals such as proprioceptive or tactile afferents in the absence of information from other modalities such as vision. In the context of rehabilitation its ultimate goal is to improve or restore sensorimotor function [17]. For the sake of brevity and consistency with existing literature we use the term proprioceptive training throughout this paper, but the reader should be mindful that such training is always a form of proprioceptive-motor training, because proprioception it is inherently linked to bodily movement. Unlike, for example, auditory training to improve pitch perception, proprioceptive training typically involves limb or bodily motion or postures.
With respect to improving impaired motor performance due to proprioceptive dysfunction, several approaches have been suggested to substitute or to augment residual proprioception through feedback from other sensory modalities in the hope that it would stabilize or improve motor function. Such sensory substitution has been provided through visual displays, the modulation of auditory pitch or by attaching mechanical vibrating stimulators to the skin [18]. There have been additional attempts to directly stimulate somatosensory afferents through neural interfaces using penetrating or surface electrodes [19] with the same aim of enhancing residual proprioceptive function.
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