Modelling of a Cable-driven Ankle Rehabilitation Robot

Ankle injury is one of physical injury that commonly occurs in sports or domestic-related activities. Presently, there are various established treatments for ankle rehabilitation in hospital or rehabilitation clinic. This involves a range of motion treatment exercise and endurance treatment exercise. However, current treatment requires patients to frequently visit to the hospital which is tedious and also repetitive. One of the solutions to deal with the repetitiveness of the treatment is to introduce an automated device such as a robot that can help the therapist to perform this repetitive task on the patients. A concept design for a cable driven ankle rehabilitation robot has been proposed for this task. The reason for selecting cable-based design is the design is lighter than a rigidly based robot. This adds up its potential for mobility and portability which allows convenience to the users. The focus of this paper is to present inverse kinematics analysis and modelling of the proposed concept design of the robot which aimed to determine the feasibility of the concept design. Overall, the modelling of the cable-based ankle rehabilitation robot using inverse kinematics is feasible to project or to predict the trajectory paths of the moving platform of the robot. This will be useful for planning suitable dimension for fabrication of the robot

A no-reference image quality assessment metric for wood images

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a vital element in improving the efficiency of an automatic recognition system of various wood species. There is a need to develop a No-Reference IQA (NR-IQA) system as a perfect and distortion free wood images may be impossible to be acquired in the dusty environment in timber factories. To the best of our knowledge, there is no NR-IQA developed for wood images specifically. Therefore, a Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Gabor features-based NR-IQA (GGNR-IQA) metric is proposed to assess the quality of wood images. The proposed metric is developed by training the support vector machine regression with GLCM and Gabor features calculated for wood images together with scores obtained from subjective evaluation. The proposed IQA metric is compared with a widely used NR-IQA metric, Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE) and Full Reference-IQA (FR-IQA) metrics. Results shows that the proposed NR-IQA metric outperforms the BRISQUE and the FR-IQA metrics. Moreover, the proposed NR-IQA metric is beneficial in wood industry as a distortion free reference image is not needed to evaluate the wood image

Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Gabor Features Based No-Reference Image Quality Assessment for Wood Images

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is an imperative element in improving the effectiveness of an automatic wood recognition system. There is a need to develop a No-Reference-IQA (NR-IQA) system as a distortion free wood images are impossible to be acquired in the dusty environment in timber factories. Therefore, a Gray Level Co- Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Gabor features-based NR-IQA, GGNR-IQA algorithm is proposed to evaluate the quality of wood images. The proposed GGNR-IQA algorithm is compared with a well-known NR-IQA, Blind/Referenceless Image Spatial Quality Evaluator (BRISQUE) and Full-Reference-IQA (FR-IQA) algorithms, Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Multiscale SSIM (MS-SSIM), Feature SIMilarity (FSIM), Information Weighted SSIM (IW-SSIM) and Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation (GMSD). Results shows that the GGNR-IQA algorithm outperforms the NR-IQA and FR-IQAs. The GGNR-IQA algorithm is beneficial in wood industry as a distortion free reference image is not required to pre-process wood images

Hemodynamic study on upper extremity: simulation on straight reverse saphenous vein graft

Artery reconstruction in upper extremities is rare performed compare to the incidence of reconstruction in lower extremities. In many cases, primary vascular repair was performed, whenever, otherwise, the interposition vein graft or venous bypass grafting were used in order to alleviate vascular occlusion. However, after grafting technique are applied, one or more of the digital arteries are blocked or severely narrowed because of mismatch of end-to-side or end-to-end reverse saphenous vein graft. The objective of this study was to understand the end-to-end blood flow influence on reverse saphenous vein graft with small diameter. The finite volume method was employed to model the 3-D blood flow pattern to determine the velocity, pressure gradient, flow, wall shear stress, flow resistance and longitudinal impedance (ZL). We expected that reverse saphenous vein graft behave hydraulically like provide straight graft. Furthermore longitudinal impedance modulus (ZL) is expected to be inverse proportional to small diameter

Computational fluid dynamic analysis on microvascular vein grafting: effect of mismatched conduit diameters

An artery disease of upper extremity is uncommon happened. The most common cause of artery disease in upper extremity is atherosclerosis. In few patients with artery disease, surgical vein bypassing or vein interposition is frequently performed. However, one or more the internal diameters of applied vein graft are blocked or severely norrowed due to the mismatched diameter between existing artery and vein graft. The objective of this study is to investigate the blood flow influence on vein graft with mismatched diameter failure. The 3-D computational fluid dynamic method was employed to determine pulsatile flow velocity, pulsatile pressure gradient, and wall shear stress impact on the mismatched diameter of artery-vein graft model. We expect that pulsatile flow velocity, pulsatile pressure gradient, and wall shear stress impact on mismatched diameter of artery-vein graft model to behave non-hydraulically compared to an ideal matched model

An Experimental Framework for Assessing Emotions of Stroke Patients using Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Abstract: This research aims to assess the emotional experiences of stroke patients using Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Since emotion and health are interrelated, thus it is important to analyse the emotional states of stroke patients for neurofeedback treatment. Moreover, the conventional methods for emotional assessment in stroke patients are based on observational approaches where the results can be fraud easily. The observational-based approaches are conducted by filling up the international standard questionnaires or face to face interview for symptom recognition from psychological reactions of patients and do not involve experimental study. This paper introduces an experimental framework for assessing emotions of the stroke patient. The experimental protocol is designed to induce six emotional states of the stroke patient in the form of video-audio clips. In the experiments, EEG data are collected from 3 groups of subjects, namely the stroke patients with left brain damage (LBD), the stroke patients with right brain damage (RBD), and the normal control (NC). The EEG signals exhibit nonlinear properties, hence the non-linear methods such as the Higher Order Spectra (HOS) could give more information on EEG in the signal’s analysis. Furthermore, the EEG classification works with a large amount of complex data, a simple mathematical concept is almost impossible to classify the EEG signal. From the investigation, the proposed experimental framework able to induce the emotions of stroke patient and could be acquired through EEG

In vitro evaluation of finger's hemodynamics for vein graft surveillance using electrical bio-impedance method

Electrical bio-impedance measurement has great potential in many biomedical applications including vein graft surveillance. Studies have shown that thrombosis was the major cause of the vein graft failure. The meticulous skills of the surgeon and effective postoperative surveillance of vein graft remain the cornerstones of clinical success in the current surgical management of vein graft survival. Vascular blood flow is the key clinical indicators for the evaluation of patency of the vein graft and ensuring the patient's quality of life. In this work, electrical bio-impedance method has been proposed as an alternative to the existing surveillance method as it is non-invasive, portable, easy applicable in practice, fast response, radiation free, and required only low-cost instrumentation. It was employed to measure pulsatile changes in longitudinal bio-impedance to quantify arterial blood flow and blood volume. We expect that by measuring the changes in tissue bio-impedance which can be used to evaluate important peripheral hemodynamic, it allows the detection of early stage stenosis within vascular and vein graft as well as estimate its severity with predetermined normative data provided

CFD analysis on mismatched end-to-end internal diameter of RSVG models

A digital arterial disease in upper extremity is uncommon happened compare to arterial disease in lower extremity. A surgical vein graft interposition is performed as revascularization procedure. However, mismatching between end-to-end internal diameter of reverse saphenous vein graft (RSVG) and existing digital artery cause blockage in RSVG vessel. In previous study, size discrepancy (small to large) in vessel causes the abnormal blood flow and will initiate the thrombosis formations as stated by Rory F. et al. Furthermore, their previous study is also supported by clinical theory as written in Wilmer W. et al. and Krishnan B. Chandran et al.s’ text books. The main goal of this study is to analyze the relationship the patterns of blood flow through mismatching between end-to-end internal diameter of RSVG models and existing digital artery (large to small) with effect to the initiation of thrombus formation in RSVG models. A Three-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamic (3-D CFD) method is employed to investigate blood flow velocity, blood pressure gradient and wall shear stress (WSS) on ideal straight (well matched between internal diameter of RSVG and recipient arteries) and internal diameter mismatched of end-to-end RSVG models. In this experiment, we expect that steady state laminar blood flow demonstrates abnormal flow pattern in mismatched internal diameter RSVG models compared to an ideal straight model. As conclusion, any abnormal blood flow pattern will initiate the formation of thrombus and reduce the vein graft survival

Overcoming issues of oil palm plantations manual1 work with ergonomic and engineering considerations

This paper is an initial study by reviewing current situation and researches to determine the issues with manual works in an oil palm plantation and the need for mechanisation with consideration for the application in the smallholder plantations. The smallholder oil palm plantations in certain areas, activities of harvesting, collecting, loading and pruning are still done using manual tools. The small land size ownership means it is not economical to acquire large machineries and current harvesting technologies to reduce the burden of the plantation works. Therefore, the current practise is still in favour. With the increasing awareness and role of ergonomic in recent days, a new solution for this current situation must be taken action not only for the benefit of human in terms of wellbeing but also towards the better gain margin as human productivity increases. Reviews on this paper is based on the three job scopes that had been identified high risk for musculoskeletal disorders, the use of manual tools and equipment, mechanised option for the manual tools and equipment, and issues with both manual and some developed mechanised solution

Noise Elimination for Image Subtraction in Printed Circuit Board Defect Detection Algorithm

Image subtraction operation has been frequently used for automated visual inspection of printed circuit board (PCB) defects. Even though the image subtraction operation able to detect all defects occurred on PCB, some unwanted noise could be detected as well. Hence, before the image subtraction operation can be applied to real images of PCB, image registration operation should be done to align a defective PCB image against a template PCB image. This study shows how the image registration operation is incorporated with a thresholding algorithm to eliminate unwanted noise. The results show that all defects occurred on real images of PCB can be correctly detected without interfere by any unwanted noise