Human Gait Control Using Functional Electrical Stimulation Based on Controlling the Shank Dynamics

Introduction: Efficient gait control using Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is an open research problem. In this research, a new intermittent controller has been designed to control the human shank movement dynamics during gait. Methods: In this approach, first, the three-dimensional phase space was constructed using the human shank movement data recorded from the healthy subjects. Then, three iterated sine-circle maps were extracted in the mentioned phase space. The three identified one-dimensional maps contained the essential information about the shank movement dynamics during a gait cycle. Next, an intermittent fuzzy controller was designed to control the shank angle. According to the adopted intermittent control strategy, the fuzzy controller is activated whenever the shank angle is far enough from the specific. The specific points are described using the identified iterated maps in the constructed phase space. In this manner, the designed controller is activated during a short-time fraction of the gait cycle time. Results: The designed intermittent controller was evaluated through some simulation studies on a two-joint musculoskeletal model. The obtained results suggested that the pattern of the obtained hip and knee joint trajectories, the outputs of the musculoskeletal model, were acceptably similar to the joints’ trajectories pattern of healthy subjects.  Conclusion: The intriguing similarity was observed between the dynamics of the recorded human data and those of the controlled musculoskeletal model. It supports the acceptable performance of the proposed control strategy

Assessment on the Dissemination and Knowledge Translation of Medical Students and PhD Students’ Theses in the Year 2006-2013

Objective: The importance of research and its fundamental role in the country’s growth and development is vital. Connecting research to knowledge translation is an essential component of research process and its production, management, and the maintenance of this process is the reason behind the survival of the national health research system. Knowledge translation is the process of disseminating knowledge into actual use, or simply application of knowledge. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study conducted on 418 university students enrolled in medical universities throughout the country during the period from September 2006 to 2013. Results: About 42.5% of respondents have expressed that results of dissertations will benefit the health care providers while 2.2% of respondents have expressed that research results can benefit the industrial sector, they further expressed that 11.4% of researchers and 32.2% of the general population can benefit from these researches. Furthermore, in order that results of students’ dissertations will become useful to others 71.7% of the students have expressed that research results be published as an article in international indexed journals. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that majority of students have selected the title of their research project based on their personal interest and then decided based on the opinion of their thesis mentor. The principles of accurate and relevant data management must be implemented in order that researches will be directed toward being more practical rather than theoretical. Hence, by performing more extensive researches, barriers as well as factors that promote researches will be identified and by emphasizing on knowledge translation a cultural environment aiming at presenting research results to users will be achieved and researches and dissertations that resulted to the solution of the problems of the community will be promoted