Search results for "NOISE"
showing 10 items of 1375 documents
Temporal weighting of loudness: Comparison between two different psychophysical tasks
2016
International audience; Psychophysical studies on loudness have so far examined the temporal weighting of loudness solely in level-discrimination tasks. Typically, listeners were asked to discriminate hundreds of level-fluctuating sounds regarding their global loudness. Temporal weights, i.e., the importance of each temporal portion of the stimuli for the loudness judgment, were then estimated from listeners' responses. Consistent non-uniform " u-shaped " temporal weighting patterns were observed, with greater weights assigned to the first and the last temporal portions of the stimuli, revealing significant primacy and recency effects, respectively. In this study, the question was addressed…
Motor cortex tRNS improves pain, affective and cognitive impairment in patients with fibromyalgia: Preliminary results of a randomised sham-controlle…
2017
Objective. Fibromyalgia (FM) is a clinical syndrome characterised by widespread musculoskeletal pain, chronic fatigue, cognitive deficits, and sleep and mood disorders. The effectiveness of most pharmacological treatments is limited, and there is a need for new, effective and well-tolerated therapies. It has recently been shown that transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) of the motor cortex reduces pain, and that tDCS of the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) improves anxiety, depression and cognitive impairment in FM patients. The new technique of transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) using randomly changing alternating currents has very recently been shown to improve w…
Postural Sway During Standing and Unexpected Disturbance of Balance in Random Samples of Men of Different Ages
1985
Postural sway behavior while standing and during and after an unexpected disturbance of balance was examined in men aged 31 to 35, 51 to 55, and 71 to 75 years. The groups studied were random samples of men living in the town of Jyväskylä in 1981. Postural sway while standing was more pronounced in the older age groups, whereas after a disturbance of balance postural sway was nearly the same in all age groups. The functioning of the postural control system was correlated with the vibratory threshold on the ankles, grip strength, as well as with aerobic and anaerobic capacity within the age groups. Further, in the youngest age group the functioning of the postural control system was poorer a…
The Temporal Structure of Vertical Arm Movements
2011
Import JabRef | WosArea Life Sciences and Biomedicine - Other Topics; International audience; The present study investigates how the CNS deals with the omnipresent force of gravity during arm motor planning. Previous studies have reported direction-dependent kinematic differences in the vertical plane; notably, acceleration duration was greater during a downward than an upward arm movement. Although the analysis of acceleration and deceleration phases has permitted to explore the integration of gravity force, further investigation is necessary to conclude whether feedforward or feedback control processes are at the origin of this incorporation. We considered that a more detailed analysis of…
Environmental risk factors for sporadic acoustic neuroma (Interphone Study Group, Germany)
2007
The only known risk factor for sporadic acoustic neuroma is high-dose ionising radiation. Environmental exposures, such as radiofrequency electromagnetic fields and noise are under discussion, as well as an association with allergic diseases. We performed a population-based case-control study in Germany investigating these risk factors in 97 cases with acoustic neuroma, aged 30 to 69 years, and in 194 matched controls. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated in multiple logistic regression models. Increased risks were found for exposure to persistent noise (OR=2.31; 95% CI 1.15-4.66), and for hay fever (OR=2.20; 95% CI 1.09-4.45), but not for ionising radiation …
Multi-domain feature extraction for small event-related potentials through nonnegative multi-way array decomposition from low dense array EEG
2013
Non-negative Canonical Polyadic decomposition (NCPD) and non-negative Tucker decomposition (NTD) were compared for extracting the multi-domain feature of visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), a small event-related potential (ERP), for the cognitive research. Since signal-to-noise ratio in vMMN is low, NTD outperformed NCPD. Moreover, we proposed an approach to select the multi-domain feature of an ERP among all extracted features and discussed determination of numbers of extracted components in NCPD and NTD regarding the ERP context.
Reproducibility of multiphase pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling and the effect of post-processing analysis methods
2015
Arterial spin labeling (ASL) is an emerging MRI technique for non-invasive measurement of cerebral blood flow (CBF). Compared to invasive perfusion imaging modalities, ASL suffers from low sensitivity due to poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), susceptibility to motion artifacts and low spatial resolution, all of which limit its reliability. In this work, the effects of various state of the art image processing techniques for addressing these ASL limitations are investigated. A processing pipeline consisting of motion correction, ASL motion correction imprecision removal, temporal and spatial filtering, partial volume effect correction, and CBF quantification was developed and assessed. To fur…
Nonlinear analysis of continuous ECG during sleep I. Reconstruction.
2000
In recent years evidence has accumulated that ECG signals are of a nonlinear nature. It has been recognized that strictly periodic cardiac rhythms are not accompanied by healthy conditions but, on the contrary, by pathological states. Therefore, the application of methods from nonlinear system theory for the analysis of ECG signals has gained increasing interest. Crucial for the application of nonlinear methods is the reconstruction (embedding) of the time series in a phase space with appropriate dimension. In this study continuous ECG signals of 12 healthy subjects recorded during different sleep stages were analysed. Proper embedding dimension was determined by application of two techniqu…
The "exposome" concept - how environmental risk factors influence cardiovascular health.
2019
There is general consensus that environmental pollution and non-chemical stressors contribute to the incidence and prevalence of chronic noncommunicable disease (e.g. cardiovascular, metabolic and mental). Clinical and epidemiological studies support that air pollution and traffic noise are associated with a higher risk for cardiovascular disease and significantly contribute to overall mortality. In this respect, the “exposome” provides a comprehensive description of lifelong exposure history. A recent publication using an updated global exposure-mortality model found that the global all-cause mortality rate attributable to ambient air pollution by PM2.5 and O3 was 8.79 (95% CI 7.11–10.41) …
Noise Levels in an Urban Hospital and Workers' Subjective Responses
1995
Internal noise levels were measured in a 232-point grid that encompassed the main building of a major University Hospital in Valencia, Spain. Most noise equivalent sound levels that were obtained exceeded 55 dBA, and in some instances these sound levels were very high. Hospital workers' subjective responses to noise were evaluated with a self-answered questionnaire. A total of 295 workers volunteered to participate. Their answers revealed that the most important noise sources were located primarily inside the hospital. Noise levels were perceived to be sufficiently high to interfere with their work, and noise levels were also thought to affect patients' comfort and recovery. Most subjects t…