The best ways to maximize mobility and even prevent back pain. Walk, work and wake better with these hamstring stretches. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. We have some news you're gonna want to sit down for--but you probably shouldn't: Your hamstrings are, in all likelihood, an anatomical disaster for a number of possible reasons, not least of which being excessive time spent seated on them. "The hamstrings are three muscles located on the back of your thigh, and they're responsible for bending your knee and extending your hip," says Marissa Cummo, PT, DPT, assistant director of physical therapy at NYC Health + Hospitals Bellevue .

Avoid injury and improve efficiency with tips from a physical therapist. Don't be a snow hero. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. You know, for life's most essential resource, water knows a hundred ways to kill you if you're not careful. When it's not trying to drown you in its pools and coastlines during the summer, it shape-shifts to snow in the winter, piling up emergency room visits for those forced to shovel it.

Is hip tightness to blame for your back or knee pain? The cool tattoos are optional. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Because, even among those of us who exercise regularly, the further we get from childhood the more limited our varieties of movement typically become, leading to weaker muscles, brittler bones and less mobile joints. "We don't move laterally as much anymore, as we get older and we're not playing sports. Even if you're long-distance running, you're just moving in one plane [of motion]," says Patrick Suarez, OCS, SCS, a physical therapist based in Albany, New York.

Strengthening can help if you're staring at your phone too much. You don't need a ton of equipment to fix your neck. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you're here seeking relief from tech neck, or the forward head posture associated with the use of personal devices, we've got good and bad news. The good news is you've come to the right place; the bad news is you're probably contributing to it right now.

Simple moves to build strength and help prevent injuries. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you've never experienced low back pain, just wait. Up to 80 percent of us end up suffering it at some point during our lifetimes. In fact, lumbar pain is the second most common reason people visit a doctor behind colds and flu, making low back stretches and exercises as valuable in keeping us healthy as hand washing and vaccination.

Following a stroke, individuals often experience mobility and balance impairments due to lower-limb weakness and loss of independent joint control. Gait recovery is a key goal of rehabilitation, traditionally achieved through high-intensity therapist-led training. However, manual assistance can be physically demanding and limits the therapist's ability to interact with multiple joints simultaneously. Robotic exoskeletons offer multi-joint support, reduce therapist strain, and provide objective feedback, but current control strategies often limit therapist involvement and adaptability. We present a novel gait rehabilitation paradigm based on physical Human-Robot-Human Interaction (pHRHI), where both the therapist and the post-stroke individual wear lower-limb exoskeletons virtually connected at the hips and knees via spring-damper elements. This enables bidirectional interaction, allowing the therapist to guide movement and receive haptic feedback. In a study with eight chronic stroke patients, pHRHI training outperformed conventional therapist-guided treadmill walking, leading to increased joint range of motion, step metrics, muscle activation, and motivation. These results highlight pHRHI's potential to combine robotic precision with therapist intuition for improved rehabilitation outcomes.

This paper introduces the Ambient Intelligence Rehabilitation Support (AIRS) framework, an advanced artificial intelligence-based solution tailored for home rehabilitation environments. AIRS integrates cutting-edge technologies, including Real-Time 3D Reconstruction (RT-3DR), intelligent navigation, and large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), to create a comprehensive system for machine-guided physical rehabilitation. The general AIRS framework is demonstrated in rehabilitation scenarios following total knee replacement (TKR), utilizing a database of 263 video recordings for evaluation. A smartphone is employed within AIRS to perform RT-3DR of living spaces and has a body-matched avatar to provide visual feedback about the excercise. This avatar is necessary in (a) optimizing exercise configurations, including camera placement, patient positioning, and initial poses, and (b) addressing privacy concerns and promoting compliance with the AI Act. The system guides users through the recording process to ensure the collection of properly recorded videos. AIRS employs two feedback mechanisms: (i) visual 3D feedback, enabling direct comparisons between prerecorded clinical exercises and patient home recordings and (ii) VLM-generated feedback, providing detailed explanations and corrections for exercise errors. The framework also supports people with visual and hearing impairments. It also features a modular design that can be adapted to broader rehabilitation contexts. AIRS software components are available for further use and customization.

One morning last month, while I was waiting at a bus stop on the western edge of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, I struck up a conversation with a man in his early forties named Mykola Hryhoryan. Across from the bus stop was a bombed-out museum. I asked if he knew what had happened to it. "It was hit by a Russian drone," he said. Mykola was wearing jeans and a black parka with the hood pulled over his head. He told me that he was a soldier.

Low back pain (LBP) is a leading cause of disability globally. Following the onset of LBP and subsequent treatment, adequate patient education is crucial for improving functionality and long-term outcomes. Despite advancements in patient education strategies, significant gaps persist in delivering personalized, evidence-based information to patients with LBP. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) have demonstrated the potential to enhance patient education. However, their application and efficacy in delivering educational content to patients with LBP remain underexplored and warrant further investigation. In this study, we introduce a novel approach utilizing LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and few-shot learning to generate tailored educational materials for patients with LBP. Physical therapists manually evaluated our model responses for redundancy, accuracy, and completeness using a Likert scale. In addition, the readability of the generated education materials is assessed using the Flesch Reading Ease score. The findings demonstrate that RAG-based LLMs outperform traditional LLMs, providing more accurate, complete, and readable patient education materials with less redundancy. Having said that, our analysis reveals that the generated materials are not yet ready for use in clinical practice. This study underscores the potential of AI-driven models utilizing RAG to improve patient education for LBP; however, significant challenges remain in ensuring the clinical relevance and granularity of content generated by these models.

Adaptive training programs are crucial for recovery post stroke. However, developing programs that automatically adapt depends on quantifying how difficult a task is for a specific individual at a particular stage of their recovery. In this work, we propose a method that automatically generates regions of different task difficulty levels based on an individual's performance. We show that this technique explains the variance in user performance for a reaching task better than previous approaches to estimating task difficulty.