SPINE: Signal Processing & control In Neural Engineering
Laboratory Director: Dawnlee (Dawn) Roberson

Our laboratory is dedicated to understanding the biomechanics and neuromuscular control processes that underlie complex adaptive human movements. We are interested in examining both basic science and clinically relevant questions.

Project summary

The human hand is a very complex structure with more than 15 joints, each with at least one degree-of-freedom (DOF), and controlled by 36 muscles. Replacing the intact hand function with a prosthesis has complication due to its limitations in the control mechanism. The overall goal of this research is to develop an under-actuated specific control system for the virtual prosthetic hand, and then generalize it. Santello et al. showed that the human hand grip postures can be controlled, in a continuum, by 2 DOFs with a reduction of DOFs, which was found using principal component analysis (PCA)-a statistical technique often used to reduce dimensionality. The control mechanism developed will be biomimetic in that each joint and DOF is not controlled independently, and the prosthetic hand can be controlled using grasp posture. The real time controller using under-actuated mechanism will have four inputs using the electromyography (EMG) electrodes from subject's forearm to implement the virtual hand movement mimicking a large number of grasp postures. The four movements of the wrist will be used as the input signals to represent the prosthetic hand movement as closely intuitive as possible. The specific real-time controller will be generalized into a mathematical model and validated.

Publications

September 2007
Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting 2007 (BMES 2007) Los Angeles, CA
Isolation of the Timing and Location data at Selected Frequencies in EEG
Jun-Aug 2007
Summer Internship in neural engineering (sine) Chicago, IL
The feasibility test on prosthetic hand grasp formation with reduction of degrees of freedom
Advisor: Dr. Richard F. ff. Weir
April 2007
International Conference on System of Systems Engineering (SoSE) San Antonio, TX
Systemic View of Upper Extremity Prosthesis