Desempenho motor de pacientes com acidente vascular cerebral em um jogo baseado em realidade virtual

The Cerebral Vascular Accident (CVA) is the leading cause of motor disability in adults and elderly and that is why it still needs effective interventions that contribute to motor recovery. Objective: This study was aimed to evaluate the performance of stroke patients in chronic stage using a virtual reality game. Method: 20 patients (10 with injury to the left and 10 to the right side), right-handed, average age 50.6 ± 9.2 years, and 20 healthy subjects with average age of 50.9 ± 8.8, also right-handed participated. The patients had a motor (Fugl-Meyer) and muscle tone assessment (Ashworth). All participants made a kinematic evaluation of the drinking water activity and then underwent training with the table tennis game on XBOX 360 Kinect®, 2 sets of 10 attempts for 45 seconds, 15 minutes rest between sets, giving a total of 30 minutes session. After training the subjects underwent another kinematic evaluation. The patients trained with the right and left hemiparect upper limb and the healthy ones with the right and left upper limb. Data were analyzed by ANOVA, t Student test and Pearson correlation. Results: There was significant difference in the number of hits between the patients and healthy groups, in which patients had a lower performance in all the attempts (p = 0.008), this performance was related to a higher level of spasticity (r = - 0.44, p = 0.04) and greater motor impairment (r = 0.59, p = 0.001). After training, patients with left hemiparesis had improved shoulder and elbow angles during the activity of drinking water, approaching the pattern of motion of the left arm of healthy subjects (p < 0.05), especially when returning the glass to the table, and patients with right hemiparesis did not obtain improved pattern of movement (p > 0.05). Conclusion: The stroke patients improved their performance over the game attempts, however, only patients with left hemiparesis were able to increase the angle of the shoulder and elbow during the functional activity execution, better responding to virtual reality game, which should be taken into consideration in motor rehabilitation

X-ARM: um modelo de representação de artefatos de software

A great challenge of the Component Based Development is the creation of mechanisms to facilitate the finding of reusable assets that fulfill the requirements of a particular system under development. In this sense, some component repositories have been proposed in order to answer such a need. However, repositories need to represent the asset characteristics that can be taken into account by the consumers when choosing the more adequate assets for their needs. In such a context, the literature presents some models proposed to describe the asset characteristics, such as identification, classification, non-functional requirements, usage and deployment information and component interfaces. Nevertheless, the set of characteristics represented by those models is insufficient to describe information used before, during and after the asset acquisition. This information refers to negotiation, certification, change history, adopted development process, events, exceptions and so on. In order to overcome this gap, this work proposes an XML-based model to represent several characteristics, of different asset types, that may be employed in the component-based development. Besides representing metadata used by consumers, useful for asset discovering, acquisition and usage, this model, called X-ARM, also focus on helping asset developers activities. Since the proposed model represents an expressive amount of information, this work also presents a tool called X-Packager, developed with the goal of helping asset description with X-ARM