Frank Borg's research while affiliated with Kokkola University Chydenius and other places

Publications (13)

Article
Full-text available
The use of progressive strength training among the elderly has become an accepted part of evidence-based practice for preventive and rehabilitative care. Exercise is undoubtedly one of the pillars for resilient aging. While research has shown impressive outcomes from strength training, the challenge remains to get elderly persons to exercise. Here...
Article
Objectives: Home care and community-based services are being increasingly promoted in elderly care to prevent the need for institutional care. As more physically and cognitively dependent clients are being cared for in the community, concerns from fire safety perspectives have been raised. The issue becomes whether the home care client can evacuat...
Article
Background When an uncontrollable fire is detected in a building there may be a 2–3 minutes window for the occupants to move to safety. Poor physical function and cognition may become critical factors in an evacuation situation. In this study a novel functional scale measuring emergency evacuation capacity of home care clients is presented. Method...
Article
For researchers in electromyography (EMG), and similar biosginals, signal processing is naturally an essential topic. There are a number of excellent tools available. To these one may add the freely available open source statistical software package R, which is in fact also a programming language. It is becoming one the standard tools for scientist...
Article
Full-text available
Entropy when applied to biological signals is expected to reflect the state of the biological system. However the physiological interpretation of the entropy is not always straightforward. When should high entropy be interpreted as a healthy sign, and when as marker of deteriorating health? We address this question for the particular case of human...
Article
Vinzenz von Tscharner (2000) has presented an interesting mathematical method for analyzing EMG-data called "intensity analysis" (EMG = electromyography). Basically the method is a sort of bandpassing of the signal. The central idea of the method is to describe the "power" (or "intensity") of a non-stationary EMG signal as a function both of time a...
Article
Full-text available
We present a summary of the basic properties of the radio wave generation, propagation and reception, with a special attention to the gigahertz bandwidth region which is of interest for wireless sensor networks. We also present some measurement results which use the so-called RSSI indicator in order to track how the field strength varies with posit...
Article
In an experiment, we combined force plate measurements and surface EMG in studying quiet and perturbed standing, involving MS (Multiple sclerosis) and controls. The aim of this paper is to report the results thus obtained on the relation between filtered gastrocnemius (GA) EMG and the anterior-posterior center-of-pressure (A/P COP) coordinate. The...
Article
The normal and the inverted pendulum continue to be one of the main physical models and metaphors in science. The inverted pendulum is also a classic study case in control theory. In this paper we consider a special demonstration version of the inverted pendulum which is controlled via a spring. If the spring constant is below a critical level the...
Article
The first part of this Review describes a few of the main methods that have been employed in non-linear time series analysis with special reference to biological applications (biomechanics). The second part treats the physical basis of posturogram data (human balance) and EMG (electromyography, a measure of muscle activity).
Article
Presents a minireview of topics concerned with balancing in quiet (bipedal) standing, and balancing of a stick. In the focus is the apparent stochastic nature of the swaying of the human inverted pendulum.
Article
Although osmosis is a familiar phenomenon, and of pivotal importance in natural systems, it is seldom explained how it might work on the molecular level (if treated at all in physics text books). The standard treatment of osmosis in thermodynamics employs the concept of the chemical potential and does not give any clues how the process "really" wor...

Citations

... To reinforce the importance of adequate supervision, Vikberg et al. (2019) showed that exercise professional supervision during a low-load training program produced significant improvements in 70-year-old participants. Similar positive results were obtained by Björkgren et al. (2021). Chen et al. (2018) demonstrated the effectiveness and safety of a medium-to-high load kettlebells-based resistance training program that included multi-joint exercises (i.e., deadlift and squat) in participants between 65 and 75 years old. ...
... The main theory of this analysis is to use a filter bank of non-stationary sEMG signal as a function of both time and frequency. In addition, the filter bank is redefined based on the Wavelet method by rescaling a given mother wavelet using center frequencies with non-constant relative bandwidth (Borg, 2010). It also proposes a variation on frequency bands with time to suit the sEMG signal investigation. ...
... (i) Summary measures of acceleration and jerk of the putter swing, previously used to characterise expertise (Mackenzie and Evans 2010;Sim and Kim 2010;Moore et al. 2012) and variance in the sagittal plane (i.e., perpendicular to the downswing); (ii) Continuous time-series of putter swing accelerations using statistical parametric mapping (Friston et al. 2011); (iii) The amplitude of postural sway and measures of total postural adjustments (centre of pressure path length and area of the 95% confidence ellipse of centre of pressure); (iv) The complexity (entropy) of postural sway to index more automatic (i.e., less consciously processed) postural control (Borg and Laxåback 2010); (v) Self-reported conscious awareness of movement. ...
... [12][13][14], as well as expert support systems for electromyographic diagnosis. The exploration of the EMG activity includes the recording of the bioelectric signal in two functional states: the resting state, in which the muscle is relaxed, and the active state, in which the muscle enhances a contraction [15]. An active state is characterized by regions in the EMG signal of relatively greater amplitude, compared to the regions associated with resting states. ...
... Neste caso, o ponto ̅ é chamado o ponto de equilíbrio do sistema ̇= ( ), desde que ̇=0 quando x= ̅ (o sistema atingirá o equilíbrio em ̅ ). A expansão da série de Taylor de f(x) em torno do ponto ̅ é dada por: [4] Que pode ser escrita como: [5] Para x suficientemente perto de ̅ , os termos maiores serão perto de zero, então eles podem ser desconsiderados para obter a aproximação: [6] Desde que f( ̅ )=0, a equação diferencial não-linear pode ser aproximada perto do ponto de equilíbrio para: ...
... Another increasingly used approach is related to the DFA method (described in the previous section). The α exponent is related to the HE parameter by [75] α = 1 + HE. The advantages of DFA over conventional methods (periodogram and R/S method) are that of permitting the detection of long-range correlations in time series with non-stationarities and of avoiding the spurious detection of apparent long-range correlations that are an artifact of non-stationarity [60,62]. ...
... Ramiai stovinčio sveiko žmogaus posturograma chaotiška, signalas nereguliarus, todėl mokslininkai mėgina išskirti tam tikrus triukšmo ir virpesių (osciliacijų) modelius [20]. ...
Citing article
... There have been several attempts primarily directed at biologists to set the record straight on the physical basis of osmosis (Stein, 1966;Kiil, 1982;Kramer and Myers, 2012), as well as accounts of the Debye model in journals (Manning, 1968;Oster and Peskin, 1992;Borg, 2003;Marbach and Bocquet, 2019;Song et al., 2021) and textbooks (Benedek and Villars, 1974;Weiss, 1996;Baumgarten and Feher, 2011;Nelson, 2014), but despite these efforts, misconceptions have persisted. The apparent simplicity of osmosis may have masked what is at bottom a rather subtle phenomenon with enormous implications for biology (Dick, 1966;House, 1974;Andersen, 2015). ...