Biomechanics Commons^™

The Effects Of Demographics And Risk Factors On The Morphological Characteristics Of Human Femoropopliteal Arteries, Sayed Ahmadreza Razian, Majid Jadidi, Alexey Kamenskiy

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Background: Disease of the lower extremity arteries (Peripheral Arterial Disease, PAD) is associated with high morbidity and mortality. During disease development, the arteries adapt by changing their diameter, wall thickness, and residual deformations, but the effects of demographics and risk factors on this process are not clear.

Methods: Superficial femoral arteries from 736 subjects (505 male, 231 female, 12 to 99 years old, average age 51±17.8 years) and the associated demographic and risk factor variables were used to construct machine learning (ML) regression models that predicted morphological characteristics (diameter, wall thickness, and longitudinal opening angle resulting from the …

The Optimal Relationship Between Actuator Stiffness And Actuation Timing For A Passive Ankle Exoskeleton: An Opensim Simulation, Cody Anderson, Hafizur Rahman, Sara Myers

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Introduction

The passive ankle exoskeleton developed by Collins et al. (2015) reduced the metabolic cost of walking with an actuation-timing of ~16% of stance [1]; however, other actuation timings have not been extensively investigated. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the optimal relationship between actuator-stiffness and actuation-timing for a passive ankle exoskeleton by using musculoskeletal modeling.

Methods

Kinematics and ground reaction forces were recorded while a healthy-young male walked on overground force-plates, and these data were exported to a musculoskeletal modeling software (OpenSim) for simulation. A passive ankle exoskeleton model was designed and integrated with a default …

Design And Development Of Software With A Graphical User Interface To Display And Convert Multiple Microscopic Histology Images, Sayed Ahmadreza Razian, Majid Jadidi, Alexey Kamenskiy

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Histological images are widely used to assess the microscopic anatomy of biological tissues. Recent advancements in image analysis allow the identification of structural features on histological sections that can help advance medical device development, brain and cancer research, drug discovery, vascular mechanobiology, and many other fields. Histological slide scanners create images in SVS and TIFF formats that were designed to archive image blocks and high-resolution textual information. Because these formats were primarily intended for storage, they are often not compatible with conventional image analysis software and require conversion before they can be used in research. We have developed a user-friendly …

The Time Of Slip Onset During Stance Influences The Characteristics Of The Unconstrained Perturbation, Corbin Rasmussen, Nathaniel Hunt

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Falls pose a significant health hazard, resulting in devastating injuries like broken wrists, fractured hips, and traumatic brain injuries that exceed $50 billion in U.S. medical costs. To address these risks, biomechanists have subjected individuals to simulated slips in order to study the factors that lead to falls. These studies have focused on slips that happen immediately after heel-strike and are unnaturally restricted by the methods used to cause the slip. Therefore, the effects of unconstrained slips that occur throughout stance phase are unknown. To address this knowledge gap, we examined the relationship between the timing of slip onset and …

Quantifying Static And Dynamic Stability Using Mobile Sensors, Mason Schleu

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Balance disorders impact millions of people causing substantial impact on quality of life due to psychological and physical hardships associated with poor balance. However, a clinically relevant, low cost, self-service system in detecting such disorders does not exist. Previous research has shown the built in accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of a smart phone to be valid tools in detecting standing balance performance using traditional linear analysis, however, such a system has yet to be proven useful in detecting dynamic postural variability. Indeed, more quantitative methods than are typically used in clinical settings are necessary for early detection of poor postural …