Introducción a la sección especial “Interacción cooperativa persona-robot en el entorno clínico”

[ES] En el trabajo: “Asistente Robótico Socialmente Interactivo para Terapias de Rehabilitación Motora con Pacientes de Pediatría” se presenta un interfaz de interacción con el robot cuyo objetivo es conseguir maximizar la adherencia del paciente al tratamiento. Para ello, se describe el desarrollo de una terapia de rehabilitación motriz centrada en un robot socialmente interactivo, basada en una arquitectura de control novedosa, RoboCog, que dota al robot de las capacidades perceptivas y cognitivas que le permiten exhibir un comportamiento socialmente desarrollado y pro-activo, que se convierte en fuente de motivación pero también en un asistente para llevar a cabo terapias rehabilitadoras personalizadasCasals, A.; García Aracil, N.; Pérez-Turiel, J. (2015). Introducción a la sección especial “Interacción cooperativa persona-robot en el entorno clínico”. Revista Iberoamericana de Automática e Informática industrial. 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riai.2014.11.008OJS7912

Interaction with a hand rehabilitation exoskeleton in EMG-driven bilateral therapy: Influence of visual biofeedback on the users’ performance

Producción CientíficaThe effectiveness of EMG biofeedback with neurorehabilitation robotic platforms has not been previously addressed. The present work evaluates the influence of an EMG-based visual biofeedback on the user performance when performing EMG-driven bilateral exercises with a robotic hand exoskeleton. Eighteen healthy subjects were asked to perform 1-min randomly generated sequences of hand gestures (rest, open and close) in four different conditions resulting from the combination of using or not (1) EMG-based visual biofeedback and (2) kinesthetic feedback from the exoskeleton movement. The user performance in each test was measured by computing similarity between the target gestures and the recognized user gestures using the L2 distance. Statistically significant differences in the subject performance were found in the type of provided feedback (p-value 0.0124). Pairwise comparisons showed that the L2 distance was statistically significantly lower when only EMG-based visual feedback was present (2.89 ± 0.71) than with the presence of the kinesthetic feedback alone (3.43 ± 0.75, p-value = 0.0412) or the combination of both (3.39 ± 0.70, p-value = 0.0497). Hence, EMG-based visual feedback enables subjects to increase their control over the movement of the robotic platform by assessing their muscle activation in real time. This type of feedback could benefit patients in learning more quickly how to activate robot functions, increasing their motivation towards rehabilitation.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación - (project RTC2019-007350-1)Consejería de Educación, Fondo Social Europeo, Gobierno Vasco - (BERC 2022-2025) y (project 3KIA (KK-2020/00049)Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades - (BCAM Severo Ochoa: SEV-2017-0718

A measurement setup and automated calculation method to determine the charge injection capacity of implantable microelectrodes

Producción CientíficaThe design of safe stimulation protocols for functional electrostimulation requires knowledge of the “maximum reversible charge injection capacity” of the implantable microelectrodes. One of the main difficulties encountered in characterizing such microelectrodes is the calculation of the access voltage Va. This paper proposes a method to calculate Va that does not require prior knowledge of the overpotential terms and of the electrolyte (or excitable tissue) resistance, which is an advantage for in vivo electrochemical characterization of microelectrodes. To validate this method, we compare the calculated results with those obtained from conventional methods for characterizing three flexible platinum microelectrodes by cyclic voltammetry and voltage transient measurements. This paper presents the experimental setup, the required instrumentation, and the signal processing.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad ( Research project DPI2016-80391-C3-3-R

Study of Cardiac Repolarization during Oral Glucose Tolerance Test in Metabolic Syndrome Patients

Abstract QT interval could be relevant for cardiopathy assessment in metabolic syndrome (MS

Force-based control strategy for a collaborative robotic camera holder in laparoscopic surgery using pivoting motion

Introduction: Laparoscopic surgery often relies on a fixed Remote Center of Motion (RCM) for robot mobility control, which assumes that the patient’s abdominal walls are immobile. However, this assumption is inaccurate, especially in collaborative surgical environments. In this paper, we present a force-based strategy for the mobility of a robotic camera-holder system for laparoscopic surgery based on a pivoting motion. This strategy re-conceptualizes the conventional mobility control paradigm of surgical robotics.Methods: The proposed strategy involves direct control of the Tool Center Point’s (TCP) position and orientation without any constraints associated with the spatial position of the incision. It is based on pivoting motions to minimize contact forces between the abdominal walls and the laparoscope. The control directly relates the measured force and angular velocity of the laparoscope, resulting in the reallocation of the trocar, whose position becomes a consequence of the natural accommodation allowed by this pivoting.Results: The effectiveness and safety of the proposed control were evaluated through a series of experiments. The experiments showed that the control was able to minimize an external force of 9 N to ±0.2 N in 0.7 s and reduce it to 2 N in just 0.3 s. Furthermore, the camera was able to track a region of interest by displacing the TCP as desired, leveraging the strategy’s property that dynamically constrains its orientation.Discussion: The proposed control strategy has proven to be effective minimizing the risk caused by sudden high forces resulting from accidents and maintaining the field of view despite any movements in the surgical environment, such as physiological movements of the patient or undesired movements of other surgical instruments. This control strategy can be implemented for laparoscopic robots without mechanical RCMs, as well as commercial collaborative robots, thereby improving the safety of surgical interventions in collaborative environments

Monitoring System for Laboratory Mice Transportation: A Novel Concept for the Measurement of Physiological and Environmental Parameters

Laboratory mice are used in biomedical research as “models” for studying human disease. These mice may be subject to significant levels of stress during transportation that can cause alterations that could negatively affect the results of the performed investigation. Here, we present the design and realization of a prototypical transportation container for laboratory mice, which may contribute to improved laboratory animal welfare. This prototype incorporates electric potential integrated circuit (EPIC) sensors, which have been shown to allow the recording of physiological parameters (heart rate and breathing rate) and other sensors for recording environmental parameters during mouse transportation. This allows for the estimation of the stress levels suffered by mice. First experimental results for capturing physiological and environmental parameters are shown and discussed

Dynamic Gesture Recognition Using a Smart Glove in Hand-Assisted Laparoscopic Surgery

This paper presents a methodology for movement recognition in hand-assisted laparoscopic surgery using a textile-based sensing glove. The aim is to recognize the commands given by the surgeon’s hand inside the patient’s abdominal cavity in order to guide a collaborative robot. The glove, which incorporates piezoresistive sensors, continuously captures the degree of flexion of the surgeon’s fingers. These data are analyzed throughout the surgical operation using an algorithm that detects and recognizes some defined movements as commands for the collaborative robot. However, hand movement recognition is not an easy task, because of the high variability in the motion patterns of different people and situations. The data detected by the sensing glove are analyzed using the following methodology. First, the patterns of the different selected movements are defined. Then, the parameters of the movements for each person are extracted. The parameters concerning bending speed and execution time of the movements are modeled in a prephase, in which all of the necessary information is extracted for subsequent detection during the execution of the motion. The results obtained with 10 different volunteers show a high degree of precision and recall

Lightweight real-time hand segmentation leveraging MediaPipe landmark detection

Producción CientíficaReal-time hand segmentation is a key process in applications that require human–computer interaction, such as gesture rec- ognition or augmented reality systems. However, the infinite shapes and orientations that hands can adopt, their variability in skin pigmentation and the self-occlusions that continuously appear in images make hand segmentation a truly complex problem, especially with uncontrolled lighting conditions and backgrounds. The development of robust, real-time hand segmentation algorithms is essential to achieve immersive augmented reality and mixed reality experiences by correctly interpreting collisions and occlusions. In this paper, we present a simple but powerful algorithm based on the MediaPipe Hands solution, a highly optimized neural network. The algorithm processes the landmarks provided by MediaPipe using morphological and logical operators to obtain the masks that allow dynamic updating of the skin color model. Different experiments were carried out comparing the influence of the color space on skin segmentation, with the CIELab color space chosen as the best option. An average intersection over union of 0.869 was achieved on the demanding Ego2Hands dataset running at 90 frames per second on a conventional computer without any hardware acceleration. Finally, the proposed seg- mentation procedure was implemented in an augmented reality application to add hand occlusion for improved user immer- sion. An open-source implementation of the algorithm is publicly available at https://github.com/itap-robotica-medica/light weight-hand-segmentation.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (under Grant Agreement No. RTC2019-007350-1)Publicación en abierto financiada por el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León (BUCLE), con cargo al Programa Operativo 2014ES16RFOP009 FEDER 2014-2020 DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN, Actuación:20007-CL - Apoyo Consorcio BUCL

Capacitive Sensing for Non-Invasive Breathing and Heart Monitoring in Non-Restrained, Non-Sedated Laboratory Mice

Animal testing plays a vital role in biomedical research. Stress reduction is important for improving research results and increasing the welfare and the quality of life of laboratory animals. To estimate stress we believe it is of great importance to develop non-invasive techniques for monitoring physiological signals during the transport of laboratory animals, thereby allowing the gathering of information on the transport conditions, and, eventually, the improvement of these conditions. Here, we study the suitability of commercially available electric potential integrated circuit (EPIC) sensors, using both contact and contactless techniques, for monitoring the heart rate and breathing rate of non-restrained, non-sedated laboratory mice. The design has been tested under different scenarios with the aim of checking the plausibility of performing contactless capture of mouse heart activity (ideally with an electrocardiogram). First experimental results are shown

Detección, mediante un guante sensorizado, de movimientos seleccionados en un sistema robotizado colaborativo para HALS

[Resumen] El uso de robots ha permitido importantes progresos en el campo de la cirugía laparoscópica convencional. Sin embargo, se ha prestado poca atención a la cirugía laparoscópica asistida a mano, una cirugía en la que el cirujano introduce la mano no dominante en el abdomen del paciente. El riesgo de colisión entre la mano del cirujano y la herramienta movida por el robot es un problema que ha de abordarse. También ha habido un creciente interés en los wearables, lo que nos lleva a la aplicación de un guante sensorizado que colabora con un robot en este tipo de cirugía. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la información proporcionada por un guante sensorizado de los movimientos de la mano del cirujano para determinar las acciones que llevará a cabo el robot colaborativo. La inclusión de un guante quirúrgico sensorizado en cirugía laparoscópica asistida por la mano (Hand Assisted Laparoscopic Surgery, HALS) dentro de un sistema colaborativo robotizado permitiría enviar información sobre movimientos específicamente seleccionados realizados por la mano del cirujano durante la intervención. Para ello han de definirse de forma unívoca ciertos movimientos de la mano que se han de identificar online para que el robot colaborativo realice las actividades pertinentesMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad; DPI2013-47196-C3-3-