Feedback Training Improves Compliance with Sternal Precaution Guidelines: Implications for Optimizing Recovery in Older Patients After Cardiac Surgery

Overview

Patients often need to use their arms to assist with functional activities, but after open heart surgery pushing with the arms is limited to < 10 lb to help minimize force across the healing sternum. The main purposes of this study were to determine: 1) how accurately older patients (> 60 years of age) can estimate arm weight bearing with 10 lb or less of force and 2) if feedback training is effective for improving ability to estimate arm force and reduce pectoralis major muscle contraction during functional activities. An instrumented walker I designed was used to measure arm force during walker ambulation and sit-stand transfers. Pectoralis major muscle electromyography (EMG) activity was measured simultaneously in study participants (n = 30). After baseline testing, study participants underwent a brief session of visual and auditory concurrent feedback training. Results showed that self-selected arm force was greater than 10 lb for all tasks (20.0-37.7 lb) but after feedback training it was significantly lower (10.6-21.3 lb). During most trials (92%), study participants used more than 12 lb of arm force. Pectoralis major muscle EMG values were less than 23% of maximal voluntary contractions and were reduced (9.8- 14.9%) after feedback training. Results indicate that older patients may not be able to accurately estimate upper extremity force used during weight bearing activities, and that visual and auditory feedback improves accuracy. Results suggest that an instrumented walker and feedback training would be very clinically useful for patients recovering from open heart surgery. Using a New Mathematical Model to Study the Formation and Development of Comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko Harper Learmonth Bronx High School of Science New York, New York This project examines the thermal properties of Comet 67P/Churyumov Gerasimenko through mathematical modeling. The goal of the project was to analyze differences between separate regions of the comet, comparing their absorption rates and conductivities, as well as analyzing the density of the comet as a function of its depth. Finding distinctions between thermal properties of regions of Comet 67P provided insight into how the comet initially formed. Three programs were used to create the mathematical model. The first program was a PDS file reader, which read through data files retrieved from the MIRO instrument on the Rosetta spacecraft and filtered out data that was not taken from the examined region. The second program used data from the PDS file reader to create a thermal model of the expected temperatures over a comet day at that region. The third program was a radiative transfer reader, which accepted data from both the thermal model and the PDS file reader and calculated the amount of radiation the MIRO instrument should be able to detect from the surface of the comet given the thermal model data. Conductivity and absorption of the thermal model were adjusted until the model fit MIRO’s data. Results did not show differences between regions across the comet, suggesting that the comet formed from colliding solid material that originated in similar areas of the Solar System. Due to the error bars of the MIRO data, the results cannot disprove the possibility that the comet formed from two or more completely different solid objects. Results also showed a uniformly higher conductivity and lower absorption in the millimeter layer of the comet. These research findings provide insight into how comets and other celestial bodies form and develop over time. Research on the thermal and physical properties of comets will also assist in the development of new technologies to protect the Earth from future comet impacts.

Competition history

• JSHS 2020 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.