Engineering Commons^™

Elbow Patients’ Data Collection And Analysis: An Examination Of Electromyography Healing Patterns, Raneem Haddara

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Musculoskeletal conditions are the most common cause of severe long-term pain and physical disability, accounting for the highest disability costs of about $17 billion yearly. To provide better rehabilitation tactics, the knowledge gap between injuries and their healing mechanisms needs to be addressed. The use of electromyography (EMG) is very popular in detecting neuromuscular diseases or nerve lesions; however, there is limited knowledge available for quantifying healing patterns of EMG in orthopedic patients who have injured their joints, muscles, or bones. In order to quantify the progress of orthopedic patients and assess their neuromuscular health and muscle synergy patterns, EMG …

Intuitive Human Robot Interfaces For Upper Limb Prosthetics, Oguz Yetkin

Bioengineering Dissertations

Modern robotic prosthetic devices for upper limb amputees promise to alleviate an important disability, but are underutilized due to the inability to properly control them. Specifically, the devices afford more degrees of freedom (DOFs) than are con- trollable by easily decoded biological signals. These devices, such as the DEKA arm, can have as many as 18 DOFs, although six is a more typical number (control of each finger plus thumb rotation). Unfortunately, the use of these devices remains limited by the ability of users to simultaneously control more than one degree of freedom at a time with commercially deployed technology. …

Functional Comparison Of Conventional Afos With The Dynamic Response Afo, Mitchell Ruble

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Ankle foot orthoses (AFOs) are commonly prescribed to provide stability and foot clearance for patients with weakened or injured musculature. The Dynamic Response AFO (DRAFO) was designed to improve proprioception at heel strike. The design includes a rigid outer shell with a cut out heel and a soft inner lining; it is typically aligned in plantarflexion and may incorporate external heel wedges. The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of the DRAFO design features and contrast its biomechanical function with that of conventional locked and articulating AFOs. The research hypotheses were: 1) DRAFO-assisted gait parameters (e.g. ankle …

Injury Risk Assessment Of The Femur In Children With Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Jessica Marie Fritz

Dissertations (1934 -)

Osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) is a genetic disorder characterized by increased bone fragility and decreased bone mass, which leads to high rates of bone fracture. OI has a prevalence of 1/5,000 to 1/10,000 in the United States. About 90% of persons with OI have a genetic mutation in the coding for collagen type I, which is the major protein of connective tissues, including bone. While its prevalence classifies it as a rare disease, it is the most common disorder of bone etiology. Until recently, little was known about the mechanics and materials of OI bone or their impact on fracture risk. …

Segway: A Simple Framework For Unsupervised Sleep Segmentation In Experimental Eeg Recordings, Farid Yaghouby, Sridhar Sunderam

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

Sleep analysis in animal models typically involves recording an electroencephalogram (EEG) and electromyogram (EMG) and scoring vigilance state in brief epochs of data as Wake, REM (rapid eye movement sleep) or NREM (non-REM) either manually or using a computer algorithm. Computerized methods usually estimate features from each epoch like the spectral power associated with distinctive cortical rhythms and dissect the feature space into regions associated with different states by applying thresholds, or by using supervised/unsupervised statistical classifiers; but there are some factors to consider when using them:

• Most classifiers require scored sample data, elaborate heuristics or computational steps not easily …