Donning/Doffing and Arm Positioning Influence in Upper Limb Adaptive Prostheses Control

[EN] New upper limb prostheses controllers are continuously being proposed in the literature. However, most of the prostheses commonly used in the real world are based on very old basic controllers. One reason to explain this reluctance to change is the lack of robustness. Traditional controllers have been validated by many users and years, so the introduction of a new controller paradigm requires a lot of strong evidence of a robust behavior. In this work, we approach the robustness against donning/doffing and arm position for recently proposed linear filter adaptive controllers based on myoelectric signals. The adaptive approach allows to introduce some feedback in a natural way in real time in the human-machine collaboration, so it is not so sensitive to input signals changes due to donning/doffing and arm movements. The average completion rate and path efficiency obtained for eight able-bodied subjects donning/doffing five times in four days is 95.83% and 84.19%, respectively, and for four participants using different arm positions is 93.84% and 88.77%, with no statistically significant difference in the results obtained for the different conditions. All these characteristics make the adaptive linear regression a potential candidate for future real world prostheses controllers.This work is partially supported by Ministerio de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte (Spain) under grant FPU15/02870. The authors would like to thank Lucas Parra for the Myo device and Janne M. Hahne for discussions about the subject of the paper.Igual, C.; Camacho-García, A.; Bernabeu Soler, EJ.; Igual García, J. (2020). Donning/Doffing and Arm Positioning Influence in Upper Limb Adaptive Prostheses Control. Applied Sciences. 10(8):1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/app10082892S119108Esquenazi, A. (2004). 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Experimental Assessment of Time Reversal for In-Body to In-Body UWB Communications

[EN] The standard of in-body communications is limited to the use of narrowband systems. These systems are far from the high data rate connections achieved by other wireless telecommunication services today in force. The UWB frequency band has been proposed as a possible candidate for future in-body networks. However, the attenuation of body tissues at gigahertz frequencies could be a serious drawback. Experimental measurements for channel modeling are not easy to carry out, while the use of humans is practically forbidden. Sophisticated simulation tools could provide inaccurate results since they are not able to reproduce all the in-body channel conditions. Chemical solutions known as phantoms could provide a fair approximation of body tissues¿ behavior. In this work, the Time Reversal technique is assessed to increase the channel performance of in-body communications. For this task, a large volume of experimental measurements is performed at the low part of UWB spectrum (3.1-5.1 GHz) by using a highly accurate phantom-based measurement setup. This experimental setup emulates an in-body to in-body scenario, where all the nodes are implanted inside the body. Moreover, the in-body channel characteristics such as the path loss, the correlation in transmission and reception, and the reciprocity of the channel are assessed and discussed.This work was supported by the Programa de Ayudas de Investigacion y Desarrollo (PAID-01-16) from Universitat Politecnica de Valencia and by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Spain (TEC2014-60258-C2-1-R), by the European FEDER funds.Andreu-Estellés, C.; Garcia-Pardo, C.; Castelló-Palacios, S.; Cardona Marcet, N. (2018). Experimental Assessment of Time Reversal for In-Body to In-Body UWB Communications. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (Online). 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A computational model for real-time calculation of electric field due to transcranial magnetic stimulation in clinics

The aim of this paper is to propose an approach for an accurate and fast (real-time) computation of the electric field induced inside the whole brain volume during a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) procedure. The numerical solution implements the admittance method for a discretized realistic brain model derived from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Results are in a good agreement with those obtained using commercial codes and require much less computational time. An integration of the developed codewith neuronavigation toolswill permit real-time evaluation of the stimulated brain regions during the TMSdelivery, thus improving the efficacy of clinical applications

3-D printed UWB microwave bodyscope for biomedical measurements

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this letter, a three-dimensional (3-D) printed compact ultrawideband (UWB) extended gap ridge horn (EGRH) antenna designed to be used for biological measurements of the human body is described. The operational frequency covers the microwave band of interest from 0.5 to 3.0 GHz (for an S 11 under -7 dB). The 3-D printed EGRH antenna is dielectrically matched to the permittivity of the human body, and because of its compactness, it can be visualized as a general-purpose microwave probe among the RF biomedical community. The probe has proven its capability as a pass-through propagation sensor for different parts of the human body and as a sensor detecting a 1 cm diameter object placed inside an artificial head phantom.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Photoacoustic Imaging using Combination of Eigenspace-Based Minimum Variance and Delay-Multiply-and-Sum Beamformers: Simulation Study

Delay and Sum (DAS), as the most common beamforming algorithm in Photoacoustic Imaging (PAI), having a simple implementation, results in a low-quality image. Delay Multiply and Sum (DMAS) was introduced to improve the quality of the reconstructed images using DAS. However, the resolution improvement is now well enough compared to high resolution adaptive reconstruction methods such as Eigenspace- Based Minimum Variance (EIBMV). We proposed to integrate the EIBMV inside the DMAS formula by replacing the existing DAS algebra inside the expansion of DMAS, called EIBMV-DMAS. It is shown that EIBMV-DMAS outperforms DMAS in the terms of levels of sidelobes and width of mainlobe significantly. For instance, at the depth of 35 mm, EIBMV-DMAS outperforms DMAS and EIBMV in the term of sidelobes for about 108 dB, 98 dB and 44 dB compared to DAS, DMAS, and EIBMV, respectively. The quantitative comparison has been conducted using Full-Width-Half-Maximum (FWHM) and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), and it was shown that EIBMV-DMAS reduces the FWHM about 1.65 mm and improves the SNR about 15 dB, compared to DMAS.Comment: Submitted in 24th Iranian Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICBME 2017