Engineering Commons^™

Sustainable Small House Project, Mollie Jo George

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The Sustainable Small House Project was developed in cooperation with UNO/UNL Engineering, UNO Gerontology, and Metro Community College. This project merges both sustainable living with the small house movement to promote aging-in-place for older adults. This presentation describes the journey of Dr. Bing Chen as he envisioned the Sustainable Small House Project to its development and finally to implementation at its current location--west of Baxter Arena or adjacent to the UNO ballfield.

From a gerontological lens, the project focuses on principles of universal design which allows for aging-in-place, fall-detection and prevention using smart technologies such as Nobi, and voice-activated technologies …

Foot Temperature Before And After Walking In Patients With Peripheral Artery Disease, Jose Anguiano-Hernandez

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) is a pathology that can decrease blood flow to the lower limbs, resulting in the inability to regulate body temperature [1]. The effects of impaired blood flow caused by PAD on body temperature are unclear. The purpose of this study is to compare foot temperature changes before and after walking in healthy people and in patients with PAD. We hypothesize that 1) feet affected by PAD will experience a greater increase in temperature than healthy feet during walking and 2) feet affected by PAD will experience a slower rate of temperature recovery after walking compared …

Decreasing Technology Design Costs By Using Youtube Video To Evaluate User Acceptance, Tom Chappelear

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

User acceptance is a measure that contributes to technology feasibility which is a decision point that entrepreneurs use to help make better investment decisions (Hoffer, 2011). User acceptance testing is part of a design strategy where the system designer attempts to minimize risks and provide design information that an entrepreneur can use to make better investment decisions (Hoffer, 2011). A user acceptance testing instruments can range from a low-cost coffeeshop review to expensive lab-based user testing (Shneiderman, 2017). This study builds upon the User Acceptance of Information Technology (UTAUT) model to measure user acceptance for the system being evaluated (Venkatesh, …

Visual Contributions To Balance Control During Gait, Kyle Brozek

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

We propose to isolate the contributions of continuous OF to the orthogonal relationship between balance and gait control during treadmill walking using a series of conditions. Manipulating the direction of OF using a CAREN (Motek Medical, Amsterdam, Netherlands) virtual reality treadmill environment will isolate these visual contributions in human subjects as they walk. We plan to tease out the effect of OF direction on the relationship between gait and balance control by having healthy young adults perform a series of treadmill walking trials while immersed in a VR environment. This will be done by manipulating the direction of walking and …

Estimating Variations In Metabolic Cost Within The Stride Cycle During Level And Uphill Walking, Arash Mohammadzadeh Gonabadi

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Indirect calorimetry provides the average cost of a stride cycle and prevents from identifying which part of the gait cycle causes increased metabolic cost in patients, however, recent simulation methods allow estimating the time profile of metabolic cost within the stride cycle. In this study, we compare the estimations of the time profile of the metabolic cost of two simulation methods for level and uphill walking. We used kinematic, kinetic and electromyography data from level and uphill walking (one participant) to estimate the time profiles of metabolic cost using the muscle-level metabolic model of Umberger using electromyography and kinematic data …

An Electrooculography Prosthetic Control System, Walker Arce

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

For many surface EMG (sEMG) prosthetic control systems, the muscles on the affected limb are used to trigger the control system. This can lead to fatigue in the user as they have to maintain continuous muscle activation and coactivation in order to achieve prosthetic control [3]. The crux of any prosthetic control system is the human machine interface that is developed, and at present many control systems have complicated interfaces that limit the degrees of freedom of the prosthetics. This study focuses on the development of a low-cost prosthetic control peripheral that is compatible with the prosthetics developed by Dr. …

Bimanual Coordination Assessment Using Prosthetic Simulators, Chris Copeland

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

There were a total of 1.6 million people living with loss of a limb in 2005. This number is projected to double to 3.6 million by 2050 [1]. While prosthetics aim to enhance the function of these individuals, it is estimated that 45% of pediatric prosthetic users reject their prosthesis [2]. The literature which describes the motor control mechanisms of prosthetic use is sparse and often low-powered due to inadequate number of subjects. However, prosthetic simulators may be a solution to chronically low-powered prosthetic studies by serving as functional homologues. The purpose of this investigation was to determine the efficacy …

A Radio Frequency Identification (Rfid) Prosthetic Control System, Andrew Butler

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Item classification and tagging in embedded systems has become ubiquitous in our society due to radio frequency identification (RFID) and the cost has dropped significantly for hardware that can interact with these devices. Due to this, possibilities in the realm of prosthetic control systems opens up for dynamic grip selection without user intervention. This study focuses on the development of a device capable of this functionality that is compatible with the prosthetics designed by Dr. Zuniga and his research team.

The printed circuit board (PCB) was designed using the EAGLE EDA package and incorporates a lithium polymer battery with a …

The Energy Paradox Of The Ankle-Foot Complex During Human Walking, Nikolaos Papachatzis, Kota Takahashi

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Flexor hallucis longus (FHL) is a multiarticular muscle that possesses the potential to alter foot’s functional and mechanical behavior, since it performs multiple significant functions during walking (e.g supports the medial longitudinal arch of the foot).The purpose of this study was to determine if the functional changes of the FHL are associated with the foot’s adaptations to the mechanical demands of walking. Backward walking is an experimental method capable of altering how the forces propagate underneath the foot and disrupting the mechanical function of the FHL muscle. We hypothesized that: (1) the muscle activity of the FHL will increase during …

Mobility-Based Models For Advancing Diagnostic/Predictive Healthcare, Elham Rastegari

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Functional ability has been always considered as one of the important determining factors of individuals’ health and quality of life. Traditional movement analysis systems require expensive facilities and frequent visits for patients to specialized laboratories. Portability and affordability of wearable sensors along with their improved accuracy and capability of monitoring movement during daily activities make them a potential alternative for analyzing mobility patterns for clinical and health assessment purposes. Wearable-based movement data, when combined with other relevant clinical or laboratory data, could enhance evidence-based healthcare and data-driven Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS). Utilizing the data from wearable devices, many researchers …

A Comparative Study For Feature Selection Algorithms To Analyze Gait Patterns For Health Purposes, Donovan Orn

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

A Comparative Study for Feature Selection Algorithms to Analyze Gait Patterns for Healthcare Purposes

Donovan Orn

Abstract

With the explosive use of wearable devices, there is an urgent need to find ways to utilize the data collected by such devices. In many cases, wearable devices contain accelerometers that collected different types of data. It is not always clear which data points can be used to extract information that can be used to provide useful knowledge about the health of the individuals. In this study, we proposed to research, implement, and comparing various feature selection techniques used for analyzing on gait …

Can The Presence Of A 1/F Structure In Stride-To-Stride Variability Enable Us To Withstand Falls?, Jenny A. Kent, Andreas Skiadopoulos, Jordan Wickstrom, Nikolaos Stergiou

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Falls are a persistent threat to longevity and quality of life, affecting 1/3 of older adults living in the community each year. There is strong evidence suggesting that a particular pattern within our walking reflects an ability to adapt to a continually changing environment. Specifically, the stride-to-stride patterns of healthy walking have a 1/f frequency spectrum. This has been observed to degrade to varying extents with aging and pathology. The aim of this study was to determine whether the presence of this structure of variability is related to an increased ability to withstand perturbations. We hypothesized that individuals who demonstrated …

Validation Of Postural Sway Measurements Using Wii Balance Board, Zachary Meade

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Standing balance measurements, such as postural sway, are vital for determining functional ability, risk of falling and recovery of injuries. Often the need to collect data outside of the typical clinical or research setting arises. However, obtaining these measurements outside of a laboratory setting can be very difficult, as the mobility of a laboratory-grade force plate (FP) is minimal, and its cost can be upwards of $20,000. The purpose of this study is to create a cheaper alternative by validating the Wii Balance Board’s (WBB; Nintendo, Redmond, Washington, USA) ability to measure postural sway patterns. The WBB can be acquired …

On Utilizing Big Data To Assess Health Levels, Elham Rastegari

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The general relationship between mobility/gait patterns and health conditions, has been established by many research studies. Gait patterns have been used in predicting fall incidents, assessing the movement of people with Parkinson disease and assessing gait characteristics of patients with major depression. However, not much has been reported in terms of how to utilize mobility data along with gait patterns to assess health levels and to identify early stages of certain diseases or conditions that impact mobility/gait patterns. In this project, we propose to develop a population analysis system based on recent Big Data technologies that relies on different types …

Autonomous Uav Navigation In An Indoor Environment For Warehouse Inventory Recording, Venkat Ramana Reddy Garlapati

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

UAV’s are currently used extensively in outdoor environments for various applications, including wildfire monitoring, and agricultural surveying, their use in indoor applications have been fairly restricted, owing mainly to the difficulty to maneuver them in smaller indoor spaces and the inability to use GPS-based navigation system. Nevertheless, there are many indoor applications where UAVs could provide a safe, reliable and resilient means to perform operations that are dangerous for humans such as surveillance inside chemical plants, inventory scanning in cold storages etc., Autonomous UAV navigation in an indoor environment can be achieved by finding a collision-free flight path to pass …

A Hierarchical Learning Model For Extracting Public Health Data From Social Media, Elham Rastegari

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

In decision making processes, particularly when it comes to health-related decisions, each relevant piece of information is important. This is particularly important when it comes to health conditions for which there remains a high degree of non-determinism as far as diagnosis and treatment. Online social media, are places in which people feel free to share their opinions about numerous topics, including public health issues and how individuals have responded to different types of treatments associated with diseases. social media could represent a secondary source that can be used as a supplement to other data sources. This would allow individuals as …