ABSTRACT
This special issue is ambitious in that it calls for strategic transformation in research on Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and related dementias, including innovation in both research design and value delivery, through lifestyle interventions that implicitly relate to a much broader range of comorbidities and diseases of aging. One response to this challenge is to venture beyond the boundaries of research that supports the healthcare industry. Toward this end, we introduce opportunities for research translation and knowledge transfer from NASA to the healthcare industry. Our intent is to show how NASA's approach to research can guide innovation for a smart medical home, most notably for AD and other diseases of aging. The article is organized in four major sections: (a) aggregating fragmented research communities; (b) lifestyle interventions in the medical home; (c) multiscale computational modeling and analysis; and (d) lifespan approach to precision brain health. We provide novel motivations and transformative paths to a diversity of specific lines of research, across communities, that would be difficult to discover in common methods of networking within research communities and even through sophisticated bibliographic methods. We thus reveal how knowledge transfer between the public and private sector can stimulate development of broader scientific communities and achieve a more coherent strategic approach to integration and development of a diversity of capabilities including but not limited to technology.
ABSTRACT
Studies have suggested that proper postural control is essential for the development of reaching. However, little research has examined the development of the coordination between posture and manual control throughout childhood. We investigated the coordination between posture and manual control in children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults during a precision fitting task as task constraints became more difficult. Participants fit a block through an opening as arm kinematics, trunk kinematics, and center of pressure data were collected. During the fitting task, the precision, postural, and visual constraints of the task were manipulated. Young children adopted a strategy where they first move their trunk toward the opening and then stabilize their trunk (freeze degrees of freedom) as the precision manual task is being performed. In contrast, adults and older children make compensatory trunk movements as the task is being performed. The 10-year-olds were similar to adults under the less constrained task conditions, but they resembled the 7-year-olds under the more challenging tasks. The ability to either suppress or allow postural fluctuations based on the constraints of a suprapostural task begins to develop at around 10 years of age. This ability, once developed, allows children to learn specific segmental movements required to complete a task within an environmental context.
