9 research outputs found

    A Review of Non-Invasive Haptic Feedback stimulation Techniques for Upper Extremity Prostheses

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    A sense of touch is essential for amputees to reintegrate into their social and work life. The design of the next generation of the prostheses will have the ability to effectively convey the tactile information between the amputee and the artificial limbs. This work reviews non-invasive haptic feedback stimulation techniques to convey the tactile information from the prosthetic hand to the amputee’s brain. Various types of actuators that been used to stimulate the patient’s residual limb for different types of artificial prostheses in previous studies have been reviewed in terms of functionality, effectiveness, wearability and comfort. The non-invasive hybrid feedback stimulation system was found to be better in terms of the stimulus identification rate of the haptic prostheses’ users. It can be conclude that integrating hybrid haptic feedback stimulation system with the upper limb prostheses leads to improving its acceptance among users

    Human-Machine Interfaces using Distributed Sensing and Stimulation Systems

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    As the technology moves towards more natural human-machine interfaces (e.g. bionic limbs, teleoperation, virtual reality), it is necessary to develop a sensory feedback system in order to foster embodiment and achieve better immersion in the control system. Contemporary feedback interfaces presented in research use few sensors and stimulation units to feedback at most two discrete feedback variables (e.g. grasping force and aperture), whereas the human sense of touch relies on a distributed network of mechanoreceptors providing a wide bandwidth of information. To provide this type of feedback, it is necessary to develop a distributed sensing system that could extract a wide range of information during the interaction between the robot and the environment. In addition, a distributed feedback interface is needed to deliver such information to the user. This thesis proposes the development of a distributed sensing system (e-skin) to acquire tactile sensation, a first integration of distributed sensing system on a robotic hand, the development of a sensory feedback system that compromises the distributed sensing system and a distributed stimulation system, and finally the implementation of deep learning methods for the classification of tactile data. It\u2019s core focus addresses the development and testing of a sensory feedback system, based on the latest distributed sensing and stimulation techniques. To this end, the thesis is comprised of two introductory chapters that describe the state of art in the field, the objectives, and the used methodology and contributions; as well as six studies that tackled the development of human-machine interfaces

    EMG Feedback for Enhanced Control of Myoelectric Hand Prostheses:Towards a More Natural Control Interface

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    A hybrid haptic stimulation prosthetic wearable device to recover the missing sensation of the upper limb amputees

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    A hybrid haptic feedback stimulation system that is capable in sensing the contact pressure, the surface texture, and the temperature, simultaneously, was designed for a prosthetic hand to provide a tactile sensation to amputation patients. In addition, the haptic system was developed to enable the prosthetic’s users to implement withdrawal reflexes due to the thermal noxious stimulus in a quick manner. The re-sensation is achieved by non-invasively stimulating the skin of the patients’ residual limbs, based on the type and the level of tactile signals provided by the sensory system of the prostheses. Accordingly, three stages of design and development were performed to satisfy the research methodology. A vibrotactile prosthetic device, which is designed for the detection of contact pressure and surface texture in upper extremity, represents. While, the design of a novel wearable hybrid pressure-vibration haptic feedback stimulation device for conveying the tactile information regarding the contact pressure between the prosthetic hand and the grasped objects represents the second methodology stage. Lastly, the third stage was achieved by designing a novel hybrid pressure-vibration-temperature feedback stimulation system to provide a huge information regarding the prostheses environment to the users without brain confusing or requiring long pre-training. The main contribution of this work is the development and evaluation of the first step of a novel approach for a lightweight, 7 Degrees-Of-Freedom (DOF) tactile prosthetic arm to perform an effective as well as fast object manipulation and grasping. Furthermore, this study investigates the ability to convey the tactile information about the contact pressure, surface texture, and object temperature to the amputees with high identification accuracy by mean of using the designed hybrid pressure-vibration-temperature feedback wearable device. An evaluation of sensation and response has been conducted on forty healthy volunteers to evaluate the ability of the haptic system to stimulate the human nervous system. The results in term of Stimulus Identification Rate (SIR) show that all the volunteers were correctly able to discriminate the sensation of touch, start of touch, end of touch, and grasping objects. While 94%, 96%, 97%, and 95.24% of the entire stimuli were successfully identified by the volunteers during the experiments of slippage, pressure level, surface texture, and temperature, respectively. The position tracking controller system was designed to synchronize the movements of the volunteers’ elbow joints and the prosthetic’s elbow joint to record the withdrawal reflexes. The results verified the ability of the haptic system to excite the human brain at the abnormal noxious stimulus and enable the volunteers to perform a quick withdrawal reflex within 0.32 sec. The test results and the volunteers' response established evidence that amputees are able to recover their sense of the contact pressure, the surface texture, and the object temperature as well as to perform thermal withdrawal reflexes using the solution developed in this work

    Reusable Flexible Concentric Electrodes Coated With a Conductive Graphene Ink for Electrotactile Stimulation

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    Electrotactile stimulation is a highly promising technique for providing sensory feedback information for prosthetics. To this aim, disposable electrodes which are predominantly used result in a high environmental and financial cost when used over a long period of time. In addition, disposable electrodes are limited in their size and configurations. This paper presents an alternative approach based on a 3D printed reusable flexible concentric electrode coated with a conductive graphene ink. Here, we have characterized the electrode and demonstrated its effective performance in electrotactile stimulation and sensory feedback for robotic prosthetic hands

    Development and Testing of A Wearable Vibrotactile Haptic Feedback System For Proprioceptive Rehabilitation

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    The human sense of touch is an integral part of daily life. For tasks involving grasping and manipulation of objects, force feedback is a key requirement. Most of the systems give contact point or complete grasping force feedback; for precision grasping and other physical interactions, finger awareness and force feedback from independent fingers is essential. In this study a novel, wearable proprioceptive rehabilitation system is designed which restores the ability of identifying and distinguishing between individual fingers of a prosthetic hand or an exoskeleton in a non-invasive manner. Moreover, it provides different levels of force feedback from every finger as well, which enables the user to distinguish and control force in precision grasping activities. For testing the system accuracy, classical psychophysical methods were used on a group of 14 voluntary disabled subjects. The tests were conducted in both, ideal and real-world conditions i.e. without and with distractions and accuracies were calculated accordingly. A p-test was also conducted to observe significance between the samples of with and without distraction datasets. The system performed with an overall accuracy of 82.04% which was well above the min. performance measure of 60%. Vi-HaB is standalone system and can be mounted on any upper limb rehabilitation (prosthesis, exoskeleton) system for finger awareness and force feedback

    Proceedings of the 1st European conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ECDVRAT 1996)

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    The proceedings of the conferenc

    Noise cancellation for electrotactile sensory feedback of myoelectric forearm prostheses

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