Engineering Commons^™

A Systematic Approach To High Blood Pressure Risk Analysis And Healthcare Cost Reduction In Young Adults [Metodología Sistemática Para El Análisis De Riesgo Y Reducción De Costos De Servicios Médicos De Hipertensión En Adultos Jóvenes], Francisco Rafael Torres Diaz

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to utilize publicly available data to estimate the current rate of occurrence of undiagnosed High Blood Pressure (HBP) in young adults (18 to 24 years old) and the out-of-pocket healthcare expenses associated with complications of HBP, to provide feasible alternatives to mitigate the effects on a region's economy. This has been done by building a Risk Factor Simulation Model that utilizes known HBP risk factors’ correlation to HBP, insurance coverage data, and rate of diagnosis to formulate the average Risk Factor Value for a region, which through an Annual Expected Cost Function estimates the …

Modeling Picking On Pharmaceutical Tablets, Shrikant Swaminathan

Open Access Dissertations

Tablets are the most popular solid dosage form in the pharmaceutical industry because they are cheap to manufacture, chemically and mechanically stable and easy to transport and fairly easy to control dosage. Pharmaceutical tableting operations have been around for decades however the process is still not well understood. One of the common problems faced during the production of pharmaceutical tablets by powder compaction is sticking of powder to the punch face, This is known as 'sticking'. A more specialized case of sticking is picking when the powder is pulled away form the compact in the vicinity of debossed features. In …

Design, Development And Testing Of A Balance Board With Variable Torsional Stiffness And Time Delay, Denise Renee Cruise

Open Access Theses

The ability to balance and maintain upright posture can decline for a variety of reasons, such as aging and neuromuscular impairment. As the ability to balance declines, the risk of falling increases. Falls are a major cause of injury, and often lead to a dramatic decline in quality of life. Currently, to alleviate balance deficiencies, people participate in balance training, which most commonly refers to standing on an unstable balance board; the most common boards used are either passive wobble boards, or more advanced commercial systems such as the Biodex System SD ® or the Neurocom SMART Balance Master® . …

Modeling Tools For Conformal Orthotic Devices, Steven David Riddle

Open Access Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to advance the design of conformal orthotic devices through the development of two modeling tools to address knowledge gaps in the field.

The field of human orthotics has been continually troubled by identifying successful methods of harnessing devices to the body. Past orthotics have utilized a rigid framework with minimal degrees of freedom (DOFs) driven by hard actuators attached to the body at select anchor points. Many devices design the structure and anchor points such that they reduce the degrees of freedom of a targeted joint, limiting the user's mobility and often causing the …

Evaluation Of Autonomous Robotic Milling Methodology For Natural Tooth-Shaped Implants Based On Sko Optimization, Yongki Yoon

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Robotic surgery is one of the most demanding and challenging applications in the field of automatic control. One of the conventional surgeries, the dental implantation, is the standard methodology to place the artificial tooth root composed of titanium material into the upper or lower jawbone. During the dental implant surgery, mechanical removal of the bone material is the most critical procedure because it may affect the patient's safety including damage to the mandibular canal nerve and/or piercing the maxillary sinus. With this problem, even though short term survival rates are greater than 95%, long term success rate of the surgery …

An Analytic Hierarchy Process Approach To Assess Health Service Quality, Yan Li

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

While improving quality in health care is currently at the forefront of professional, political, and managerial attention, the key dimensions constituting health-care quality have not been fully understood. Also, few valid approaches have been proposed to the measurement of health-care quality. In this research, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach is applied to study the structure of health-care quality and deducted relative importance weights for each of the quality elements. A statistical quality model is derived to assess medical equipment quality which is an important part constituting the general health-care quality. Finally, the application of the AHP model to assess …

Analysis Of Performance Capacity Of Hand Grip Through An Integrated Learning Curve Model, Miguel Torres

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

There are few activities or work task in the manufacturing industry that does not involve grip strength. That is why it is in the best interest of the manufacturing industry to have an understanding of the optimum grip strength gain capacity over time that would lead to better performance, accuracy and most of all prevent hand grip related injuries. For that reason, this thesis was concentrated in discovering a possible basic working model for estimating grip strength over time for a specific grip strength activity. The first step was to observe the trend characteristics of the strength gain data over …

Analysis Of Lifting Performance Capacity Through An Integrated Learning Curve Model, Jose Roel Flores

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Physical fitness specific to job demands is necessary for jobs that require moderate or heavy effort. Fitness training is needed not just when a new job is learned but also when an individual has been away from the job for a few weeks and returns to perform the task. The basic problem is to have a good understanding of the dynamics of performance capacities to establish training and retraining regimes to prevent overexertion. To obtain this, a better understanding of the behavior of performance capacity over time is necessary. A performance capacity training regimen was designed for tasks that required …

Human Reliability Analysis In The Performance Of Advanced Cardiac Life Support Tasks, Lucia Veronica Rosas

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Error reduction in the performance of medical emergency situations is an area of great concern in today's society. This is specially the case when the situation involves a cardiac arrhythmia. These situations are generally categorized as Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) events. The American Heart Association provides the proper procedures that practitioners of ACLS should follow to provide care to patients presenting heart arrhythmia problems. These situations occur inside and outside the hospital, outside the hospital being the most critical ones considering the limitation of equipment and availability of qualified care. Errors made by the practitioners of ACLS in this …

Using Commercial Finite Element Code Called Abaqus In Modeling Hybrid Constrained Layers Damping Beam Structure And Quantitative Determination Of The Stability Of Implant-Bone Interface Using Resonance Frequency Analysis, Daniel Delgado Jr.

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

In Chapter 1, it has been demonstrated that the damping treatments for beam and plate structures are effective, and the vibrational behaviors of the systems considered are influenced by many geometrical and material parameters. This has led to an interest in developing advanced “intelligent” structures. In the past, passive and active damping mechanisms have been used to reduce vibration. The uses of passive constrained layers are limited, but it has dissipative qualities for all the modes of the structure; and the uses of active constrained layers are limited to a single mode control. Recent published papers, many have suggested that …