Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Evaluating Eeg–Emg Fusion-Based Classification As A Method For Improving Control Of Wearable Robotic Devices For Upper-Limb Rehabilitation, Jacob G. Tryon

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Musculoskeletal disorders are the biggest cause of disability worldwide, and wearable mechatronic rehabilitation devices have been proposed for treatment. However, before widespread adoption, improvements in user control and system adaptability are required. User intention should be detected intuitively, and user-induced changes in system dynamics should be unobtrusively identified and corrected. Developments often focus on model-dependent nonlinear control theory, which is challenging to implement for wearable devices.

One alternative is to incorporate bioelectrical signal-based machine learning into the system, allowing for simpler controller designs to be augmented by supplemental brain (electroencephalography/EEG) and muscle (electromyography/EMG) information. To extract user intention better, sensor …

Development Of A Wearable Haptic Feedback Device For Upper Limb Prosthetics Through Sensory Substitution, Marco B.S. Gallone

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Haptics can enable a direct communication pipeline between the artificial limb and the brain; adding haptic sensory feedback for prosthesis wearers is believed to improve operation without drawing too much of the user's attention. Through neuroplasticity, the brain can become more cognizant of the information delivered through the skin and may eventually interpret it as inherently as other natural senses. In this thesis, a wearable haptic feedback device (WHFD) is developed to communicate prosthesis sensory information. A 14-week, 6-stage, between subjects study was created to investigate the learning trajectory as participants were stimulated with haptic patterns conveying joint proprioception. 37 …

A Wearable Mechatronic Device For Hand Tremor Monitoring And Suppression: Development And Evaluation, Yue Zhou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Tremor, one of the most disabling symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), significantly affects the quality of life of the individuals who suffer from it. These people live with difficulties with fine motor tasks, such as eating and writing, and suffer from social embarrassment. Traditional medicines are often ineffective, and surgery is highly invasive and risky. The emergence of wearable technology facilitates an externally worn mechatronic tremor suppression device as a potential alternative approach for tremor management. However, no device has been developed for the suppression of finger tremor that has been validated on a human.

It has been reported in …

Endoscopic Targeting Tasks Simulator: An Approach Using Game Engines, Shaun W. Carnegie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The pervasiveness of simulators used in professions requiring the skilled control of expensive machinery such as is the case in the aviation, mining, construction, and naval industries raises an intriguing question about the relatively poor adoption within the field of medicine. Certain surgical procedures such as neuro-endoscopic and laparoscopic lend themselves well to the application of virtual reality based simulators. This is due to the innate ability to decom- pose these complex macro level procedures into a hierarchy of subtasks that can be modelled in a software simulator to augment existing teaching and training techniques.

The research in this thesis …

Magnetic Resonance Imaging Compatible Remote Catheter Navigation System, Mohammad Ali Tavallaei

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Many vascular and cardiac diseases are diagnosed and treated using a medical technique known as percutaneous transluminal catheter intervention (PTC). In PTC, the interventionalist inserts a catheter into the vasculature, and using the vessel as the guiding passageway, the catheter is navigated to desired anatomical targets where it would be used for various purposes such as catheter ablation for the treatment/management of cardiac arrhythmias. The catheterization procedure is conventionally guided with x-ray fluoroscopic imaging and more recently, but rarely, with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). X-ray imaging irradiates the patient directly during the procedure, and the staff and interventionalists indirectly through …

Design Of A Haptic Interface For Medical Applications Using Magneto-Rheological Fluid Based Actuators, Nima Najmaei

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis reports on the design, construction, and evaluation of a prototype two degrees-of-freedom (DOF) haptic interface, which takes advantage of Magneto-Rheological Fluid (MRF) based clutches for actuation. Haptic information provides important cues in teleoperated systems and enables the user to feel the interaction with a remote or virtual environment during teleoperation. The two main objectives in designing a haptic interface are stability and transparency. Indeed, deficiencies in these factors in haptics-enabled telerobotic systems has the introduction of haptics in medical environments where safety and reliability are prime considerations. An actuator with poor dynamics, high inertia, large size, and heavy …

Development Of A Novel Handheld Device For Active Compensation Of Physiological Tremor, Abhijit Saxena

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In microsurgery, the human hand imposes certain limitations in accurately positioning the tip of a device such as scalpel. Any errors in the motion of the hand make microsurgical procedures difficult and involuntary motions such as hand tremors can make some procedures significantly difficult to perform. This is particularly true in the case of vitreoretinal microsurgery. The most familiar source of involuntary motion is physiological tremor. Real-time compensation of tremor is, therefore, necessary to assist surgeons to precisely position and manipulate the tool-tip to accurately perform a microsurgery. In this thesis, a novel handheld device (AID) is described for compensation …

Preoperative Planning Of Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery Under Uncertainty, Hamidreza Azimian

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, a computational framework for patient-specific preoperative planning of Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery (RAMICS) is developed. It is expected that preoperative planning of RAMICS will improve the rate of success by considering robot kinematics, patient-specific thoracic anatomy, and procedure-specific intraoperative conditions. Given the significant anatomical features localized in the preoperative computed tomography images of a patient's thorax, port locations and robot orientations (with respect to the patient's body coordinate frame) are determined to optimize characteristics such as dexterity, reachability, tool approach angles and maneuverability. In this thesis, two approaches for preoperative planning of RAMICS are proposed that …