scholarly journals A Hand Motor Skills Rehabilitation for the Injured Implemented on a Social Robot

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 2943
Author(s):  
Francisco Gomez-Donoso ◽  
Felix Escalona ◽  
Nadia Nasri ◽  
Miguel Cazorla

In this work, we introduce HaReS, a hand rehabilitation system. Our proposal integrates a series of exercises, jointly developed with a foundation for those with motor and cognitive injuries, that are aimed at improving the skills of patients and the adherence to the rehabilitation plan. Our system takes advantage of a low-cost hand-tracking device to provide a quantitative analysis of the performance of the patient. It also integrates a low-cost surface electromyography (sEMG) sensor in order to provide insight about which muscles are being activated while completing the exercises. It is also modular and can be deployed on a social robot. We tested our proposal in two different facilities for rehabilitation with high success. The therapists and patients felt more motivation while using HaReS, which improved the adherence to the rehabilitation plan. In addition, the therapists were able to provide services to more patients than when they used their traditional methodology.

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-369
Author(s):  
Heba Amin ◽  
Samy F. M. Assal ◽  
Hiroyasu Iwata

Abstract. The increasing number of patients with hand disabilities after strokes or peripheral nerve injuries necessitates the continuous development of rehabilitation system devices to accelerate muscle recovery and to help patients regain the motor functions of their hands. This paper introduces the design of a hand rehabilitation system for patients who have a solitary impairment of their hand extension. The system was designed to be portable, simple, and cheap. Using a system based on a cable-driven mechanism instead of traditional rigid links reduces the degrees of freedom of the finger to one. The dielectric elastomer actuator was designed and fabricated as a smart actuator for the system, which supports the low cost of the system. A kinematic analysis of the cable-driven mechanism has been done. Parameters of the actuator were optimized to reach the required output. In order to characterize the performance of the actuator, a uniaxial tension test, isotonic test, and isometric test have been implemented.


Author(s):  
Amin Asgharzadeh Alvar ◽  
◽  
Ali Esteki ◽  
Iraj Abdollahi ◽  
◽  
...  

Background: Maintaining motivation is one of the most important characteristics of rehabilitation strategies for successful treatment. Understanding the underlying mechanism of mental state is helpful for developing new therapeutic methods based on virtual reality and serious game technologies. Objective: The present study aims to develop a cost-benefit game-based hand rehabilitation system and assess the influence on the psychological state of subjects when they interact with a virtual reality environment in different task difficulty levels. Methods: First, we introduced a low-cost smart hand rehabilitation system based on the Leap Motion tracker; then, the experimental study was performed with 20 healthy participants. Their mental states were evoked using interaction with two separate games in four different difficulty levels. Three measures from the SAM self-reported test described as a psychological response to this condition, and also four features were extracted from Photoplethysmogram signal in order to quantify psychophysiological responses of Autonomic Nervous System. Results: Comparison of the different difficulty levels revealed significant changes in arousal and dominance correspond to under challenging and over the challenging condition, respectively. The results of psychophysiological feature analysis showed significant differences only for the standard deviation of intervals between consecutive heartbeats. Conclusion: The developed system is a low-cost smart solution that can be useful for upper limb neurological rehabilitation. Regulating difficulty parameters of the implemented game can be used to influence the motivation of users through rehabilitation procedures. It seems Photoplethysmogram is an appropriate psychophysiological indicator of mental states, but further studies are required.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2736
Author(s):  
Zehao Li ◽  
Shunsuke Yoshimoto ◽  
Akio Yamamoto

This paper proposes a proximity imaging sensor based on a tomographic approach with a low-cost conductive sheet. Particularly, by defining capacitance density, physical proximity information is transformed into electric potential. A novel theoretical model is developed to solve the capacitance density problem using the tomographic approach. Additionally, a prototype is built and tested based on the model, and the system solves an inverse problem for imaging the capacitance density change that indicates the object’s proximity change. In the evaluation test, the prototype reaches an error rate of 10.0–15.8% in horizontal localization at different heights. Finally, a hand-tracking demonstration is carried out, where a position difference of 33.8–46.7 mm between the proposed sensor and depth camera is achieved at 30 fps.


Healthcare ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Chong-Bin Tsai ◽  
Wei-Yu Hung ◽  
Wei-Yen Hsu

Optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) is an involuntary eye movement induced by motion of a large proportion of the visual field. It consists of a “slow phase (SP)” with eye movements in the same direction as the movement of the pattern and a “fast phase (FP)” with saccadic eye movements in the opposite direction. Study of OKN can reveal valuable information in ophthalmology, neurology and psychology. However, the current commercially available high-resolution and research-grade eye tracker is usually expensive. Methods & Results: We developed a novel fast and effective system combined with a low-cost eye tracking device to accurately quantitatively measure OKN eye movement. Conclusions: The experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves fast and promising results in comparisons with several traditional approaches.


2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 626-629
Author(s):  
M. Jayaprakasan ◽  
V. Kannan ◽  
P. Ramasamy

X-ray powder diffraction is an established method for the qualitative identification of crystalline materials and their quantitative analysis. The new generation of X-ray diffraction systems are based on expensive digital/embedded control technology and computer interfaces. Yet many laboratories use conventional manual-controlled systems withXYstrip-chart recorders. Since the output spectrum is a strip chart (hard copy), raw data, essential for structural and qualitative analysis, are not readily available for further analysis. Upgrading to modern computerized diffractometers is very expensive. The proposed automation design described here is intended to enable the conventional diffractometer user to collect, store and analyze data quickly. The design also improves the resolution by five times compared with the conventional setup. For the automation, a PC add-on card has been designed to control and collect the timing and intensity counts from the conventional X-ray diffractometer, and suitable software has been developed to collect, process and present the X-ray diffraction data for both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Moreover, a major advantage of this design is that it does not warrant any physical modification of the hardware of the conventional setup; it is simply an extension to enhance the performance of collecting raw data with a higher resolution at desired intervals/timings.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3917
Author(s):  
Jong-Dae Kim ◽  
Chan-Young Park ◽  
Yu-Seop Kim ◽  
Ji-Soo Hwang

Most existing commercial real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) instruments are bulky because they contain expensive fluorescent detection sensors or complex optical structures. In this paper, we propose an RT-PCR system using a camera module for smartphones that is an ultra small, high-performance and low-cost sensor for fluorescence detection. The proposed system provides stable DNA amplification. A quantitative analysis of fluorescence intensity changes shows the camera’s performance compared with that of commercial instruments. Changes in the performance between the experiments and the sets were also observed based on the threshold cycle values in a commercial RT-PCR system. The overall difference in the measured threshold cycles between the commercial system and the proposed camera was only 0.76 cycles, verifying the performance of the proposed system. The set calibration even reduced the difference to 0.41 cycles, which was less than the experimental variation in the commercial system, and there was no difference in performance.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianyun Yuan ◽  
Yu (Wolf) Song ◽  
Gerald A. Kraan ◽  
Richard H. M. Goossens

Abstract Measuring the motion of human hand joints is a challenging task due to the high number of DOFs. In this study, we proposed a low-cost hand tracking system built on action cameras and ArUco markers to measure finger joint rotation angles. The lens distortion of each camera was corrected first via intra-calibration and the videos of different cameras were aligned to the reference camera using a dynamic time warping based method. Two methods were proposed and implemented for extracting the rotation angles of finger joints: one is based on the 3D positions of the markers via inter-calibration between cameras, named pos-based method; the other one is based on the relative marker orientation information from individual cameras, named rot-based method. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system. The right hand of a volunteer was included in this practical study, where the movement of the fingers was recorded and the finger rotation angles were calculated with the two proposed methods, respectively. The results indicated that although using the rot-based method may collect less data than using the pos-based method, it was more stable and reliable. Therefore, the rot-based method is recommended for measuring finger joint rotation in practical setups.


Author(s):  
Manuel A. León ◽  
Paul A. Romero ◽  
Washington X. Quevedo ◽  
Oscar B. Arteaga ◽  
Cochise Terán ◽  
...  

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