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

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

Design an Interfacing Tracking System in Rehabilitation Therapies Between The Elbow Joint of The Human Arm and The Prosthetic Arm

Myoelectric prostheses have seen an increased application in clinical practice and research, due to their potential for good functionality and versatility. Yet, myoelectric prostheses still suffer from a lack of intuitive control and haptic feedback, which can frustrate users and lead to abandonment. To address this problem, a prosthetic arm was designed to help the amputees, who unfortunately lost their upper limb. Then, the prosthetic arm was equipped with a hybrid haptic feedback stimulation system to compensate for the missing sensation and enable the amputees to easily perform their normal life activities. The tracking system between the elbow joints of the human and the prosthetic arms was required to accomplish the experimental tests with the able-body subjects. Accordingly, this study is a platform for the main project. The major problem is to synchronize the movements of the prosthetic arm’s elbow joint with the human arm’s elbow joint within a high response, acceptable accuracy, and low error. Therefore, the PID controller was used to control the tracking system and the flexible bending sensor was attached to the volunteer’s elbow joint to record its rotational movements. The results verified the functionality of the proposed tracking system to synchronize the joints movements and enable the prosthetic arm to follow the movements of the volunteer’s arm within 0.062 sec. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed elbow joints tracking system to synchronize the motions of the volunteer and he prosthetic arms was concluded. &nbsp

Comparative Computational Study of Mechanical Behavior in Self-Expanding Femoropopliteal Stents

The use of the stent to treat peripheral artery disease (PAD) is increased and the proportion of failures also increases. The femoropopliteal artery (FPA) experiences a high deformation ratio compared to the cardiovascular artery due to limp flexion and daily activities that could lead to stent failure, as well as increasing the number of observed mortality and morbidity. In the present work, two of the common PAD stent design models represented as STENT I and STENT II were analyzed by using of finite element method (FEM) to simulate the most mechanical loading modes that could occur in FPA, such as axial tension and compression, torsion, three-point bending and radial compression to give a good understanding of deformation that affected stent inside the in-vivo. The gradual force load was used to simulate all modes, the force values are 0.25 N, 0.5 N, 1.5 N, 2.5 N, 3.5 N and 5.5 N until the stent models obtain the yield-point. The comparison of stent models (STENT I, STENT II) was performed in terms of graphs of total deformation, force-stress and stress-strain for all test modes. The similarity ratio of the total deformation in axial tension and the compression mode for STENT I and STENT II was 17% and that may indicate that STENT I obtained a high deformation value instead of STENT II, while, the torsion similarity ratio was 86% which could show a good agreement in this mode, as well as the similarity ratio, was 78% of the total three-point bending deformation and the value of the similarity ratio in the radial compression mode was 23%. Still unclear what is the clinical mode of mechanical deformation that is more important than others with changing the length of the lesion and stent diameter, and the fatigue life test provides a better understanding of the mechanical tests that must be sought

Mechanisms and treatment of femoropoplitealin-stent restenosis

The problem of stent restenosis (SRI) in the femoropopliteal artery (FP) has not yet been resolved; the predictive factors of the mechanisms and treatment in FP-ISR are unclear. The objective of this study is to investigate and give a clear explanation of the mechanisms and factors of FP-ISR that contributed to ISR, as well as a brief survey of the methods that have been used to treat FP-ISR. Methods of treatment with FP-ISR, such as medical, endovascular and bypass surgery, are used for several types of FP-ISR, the DEB device chosen as the first recommended method due to its effectiveness and ease of use

A hybrid haptic stimulation wearable device to recover the missing sensation of the upper extremity prostheses’ users

A hybrid haptic feedback stimulation system that is capable in sensing 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, a novel hybrid pressure-vibration- temperature feedback stimulation system was design to provide a huge information regarding the prostheses environment to the users without brain confusing or requiring long pre-training. An evaluation of sensation and response will be performed with healthy volunteers to evaluate the ability of the haptic system to stimulate the human nervous system. The results were presented in term of Stimulus Identification Rate (SIR). 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

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

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

A Hybrid Haptic Feedback Stimulation Prosthetic Device to Recover the Missing Sensation of Upper Extremity Amputees

Anon-invasive hybrid haptic feedback stimulation system that can sense the contact pressure was designed for a prosthetic hand, in order to recover the missing sensation of the amputation patients. The main objective of this work is to develop and evaluate the first step of a novel approach for a lightweight, 7 Degrees-Of-Freedom (DOF) prosthetic arm to perform an effective object manipulation and grasping. Furthermore, to convey the tactile information about the contact pressure with high identification accuracy. However, a novel wearable hybrid pressure-vibration haptic feedback stimulation device for providing the tactile information about the contact pressure between the prosthetic hand and the grasped objects to the user’s brain is designed to achieve the main objective of this study. An evaluation of sensation and response has been conducted with forty healthy subjects to evaluate the ability of the haptic system to stimulate the human nervous system. The results in term of Stimulus Identification Rate (SIR) presented that the whole participants were correctly able to discriminate the sensation of touch, stare of touch, end of touch, and grasping objects. While 94%, and 96% of the entire stimuli were successfully identified by the volunteers during the experiments of slippage, pressure level, respectively

Data-Driven Model for Upper Limb Spasticity Detection

Healthcare providers in the field of physical and rehabilitation medicine play a vital role to help patients suffering spasticity readapting themselves to their normal daily activities. Mathematical modeling of spasticity has the potential to avoid the issue of variability in the assessment of spasticity using the Modified Ashworth scale (MAS). In this work, an existing mathematical model for upper limb spasticity is verified using clinical data sets of upper limb spasticity collected in Malaysia at the level of MAS 1+. The data set consists of torque values measured at each elbow angle as the elbow extends from a full flexion position to a full extension position during slow and fast stretch of the forearm. The aim is to find out the capability of the mathematical model and lay a foundation for the future work on data-driven modeling of upper limb spasticity based on the Modified Ashworth Scale

Development and evaluation of a spot sensor glove for the tactile prosthetic hand

A tactile glove sensory system of the haptic feedback stimulation system for the upper limb prostheses was developed in this work to enable the patients of the upper limb amputation to recover the sense of touch and slippage. The system features six of a spot piezoresistive force sensors of type Quantum tunnelling composites (QTC) with 10 mm diameter, in order to measure the contact pressure between the hand and the objects. Five sensors were distributed on each fingertip and an extra sensor was mounted on the hand’s palm to cover all the critical point and increase the probability of detecting the contact pressure. The tactile glove was fabricated from the plastic glove equipping with a rigid foundation under each pressure sensor. The computer system was programmed to select the instant greatest signal from the six sensors’ signals; in order to create a critical output signal that can be provided to the haptic feedback stimulator. The touch and the slippage detection experimental tests have been done to examine the functionality of the tactile sensory glove for detecting the touch, start of touch, end of touch grasp, and slippage. The testing results showed that the amputees were able to recover the sensation of the contact pressure using a spot sensor tactile glove developed in this work