Design study of an earthquake rescue robot

This thesis describes the design of a brush robot for earthquake rescue and for traversing pipes with varied cross sectional shape. Earthquake rescue is a very dangerous, difficult and challenging task, in which emergency services rescue people who are trapped in man-made structures, such as collapsed buildings after an earthquake. The building collapse may have been caused by natural or man-made events. This technology is also applicable to tunnel collapse and land slips. The focus of this work is finding the location of victims and provision of primary life support and communications. To illustrate the concept of the robot, the thesis first discusses the current development of rescue robots and pipe robots. Then the thesis focuses on the description of a brush based pipe robot, developed by the University of Durham, which would be used as the basis of an earthquake rescue robot. The concept of the robot was illustrated and compared with other current rescue robots and pipe robots. After outlining the advantages of this robot concept, a robot body shape change theory was proposed and theoretical simulations were used to verily the practicality of the robot shape change theory. The thesis also illustrates the design of the working principle and design of a robot sensor, which was subsequently used in the robot shape change experiments. The robot body shape change experiments and the experimental results are described and discussed. The experimental results illustrate the robot concept and support the robot body shape change theory. Chapter 6 focuses on the brush unit traction investigation, bristle theory and mathematical model. Furthermore, the bristle theory and mathematical model were used to explain the variation of traction force in the traction experiments

A Review of Telemedicine in China

Telemedicine changes conventional medical practice and enables patients to access medical service via telecommunication. Telemedicine thus establishes a new kind of relationship between smaller hospitals and larger ones, and between patients and hospitals generally. Patients and subordinate hospitals may benefit from the resources of large hospitals, via teleconsultation, telediagnosis and telemonitoring. This is particularly beneficial for patients living in rural areas, where the health-care system is less well developed than in cities

Using Distributed Wearable Sensors to Measure and Evaluate Human Lower Limb Motions

This paper presents a wearable sensor approach to motion measurements of human lower limbs, in which subjects perform specified walking trials at self-administered speeds so that their level walking and stair ascent capacity can be effectively evaluated. After an initial sensor alignment with the reduced error, quaternion is used to represent 3-D orientation and an optimized gradient descent algorithm is deployed to calculate the quaternion derivative. Sensors on the shank offer additional information to accurately determine the instances of both swing and stance phases. The Denavit-Hartenberg convention is used to set up the kinematic chains when the foot stays stationary on the ground, producing state constraints to minimize the estimation error of knee position. The reliability of this system, from the measurement point of view, has been validated by means of the results obtained from a commercial motion tracking system, namely, Vicon, on healthy subjects. The step size error and the position estimation accuracy change are studied. The experimental results demonstrated that the extensively existed sensor misplacement and sensor drift problems can be well solved. The proposed self-contained and environment-independent system is capable of providing consistent tracking of human lower limbs without significant drift

Heterogeneous data fusion for three-dimensional gait analysis using wearable MARG sensors

Gait analysis has become a research highlight. In this paper, we propose a computing method using wearable magnetic angular rate and gravity (MARG) sensor arrays with wireless network, which calculates absolute and relative orientation and position information of human foot motion during level walking and stair climbing process. Three-dimensional foot orientation and position were estimated by a Kalman-based sensor fusion algorithm and validated by ground truth provided by Vicon system. The repeatability of the alignment procedure and the measurement errors were evaluated on healthy subjects. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has a good performance at both motion patterns. No significant drifts exist in the overall results presented in the paper. The measured and estimated information can be transmitted to remote server through internet. Moreover, this method could be applied to other cyclical activity monitoring

Applications of MEMS Gyroscope for Human Gait Analysis

After decades of development, quantitative instruments for human gait analysis have become an important tool for revealing underlying pathologies manifested by gait abnormalities. However, the gold standard instruments (e.g., optical motion capture systems) are commonly expensive and complex while needing expert operation and maintenance and thereby be limited to a small number of specialized gait laboratories. Therefore, in current clinical settings, gait analysis still mainly relies on visual observation and assessment. Due to recent developments in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology, the cost and size of gyroscopes are decreasing, while the accuracy is being improved, which provides an effective way for qualifying gait features. This chapter aims to give a close examination of human gait patterns (normal and abnormal) using gyroscope-based wearable technology. Both healthy subjects and hemiparesis patients participated in the experiment, and experimental results show that foot-mounted gyroscopes could assess gait abnormalities in both temporal and spatial domains. Gait analysis systems constructed of wearable gyroscopes can be more easily used in both clinical and home environments than their gold standard counterparts, which have few requirements for operation, maintenance, and working environment, thereby suggesting a promising future for gait analysis

Mechanism for resveratrol-induced cardioprotection against reperfusion injury involves glycogen synthase kinase 3β and mitochondrial permeability transition pore

Resveratrol pretreatment can protect the heart by inducing pharmacological preconditioning. Whether resveratrol protects the heart when applied at reperfusion remains unknown. We examined the effect of resveratrol on myocardial infarct size when given at reperfusion and investigated the mechanism underlying the effect. Isolated rat hearts were subjected to 30 min ischemia followed by 2 h of reperfusion, and myocardial samples were collected from the risk zone for Western blot analysis. Mitochondrial swelling was spectrophotometrically measured as a decrease in absorbance at 520 nm (A520). Resveratrol reduced infarct size and prevented cardiac mitochondrial swelling. Resveratrol enhanced GSK-3β phosphorylation upon reperfusion, an effect that was mediated by the cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP)/protein kinase G (PKG) pathway. Resveratrol translocated GSK-3β from cytosol to mitochondria via the cGMP/PKG pathway. Further studies showed that mitochondrial GSK-3β was co-immunoprecipitated with cyclophilin D but not with VDAC (voltage dependent anion channel) or ANT (adenine nucleotide translocator). These data suggest that resveratrol prevents myocardial reperfusion injury presumably by targeting the mPTP through translocation of GSK-3β from cytosol to mitochondria. Translocated GSK-3β may ultimately interact with cyclophilin D to modulate the mPTP opening

Inertial/magnetic sensors based pedestrian dead reckoning by means of multi-sensor fusion

The challenges of self-contained sensor based pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) are mainly sensor installation errors and path integral errors caused by sensor variance, and both may dramatically decrease the accuracy of PDR. To address these challenges, this paper presents a multi-sensor fusion based method in which subjects perform specified walking trials at self-administered speeds in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. After an initial calibration with the reduced installation error, quaternion notation is used to represent three-dimensional orientation and an extend Kalman filter (EKF) is deployed to fuse different types of data. A clustering algorithm is proposed to accurately distinguish stance phases, during which integral error can be minimized using Zero Velocity Updates (ZVU) method. The performance of proposed PDR method is evaluated and validated by an optical motion tracking system on healthy subjects. The position estimation accuracy, stride length and foot angle estimation error are studied. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed self-contained inertial/magnetic sensor based method is capable of providing consistent beacon-free PDR in different scenarios, achieving less than 1% distance error and end-to-end position error