A Novel IMU-Based System for Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders Risk Assessment.

This study introduces a novel wearable Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based system for an objective and comprehensive assessment of Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs), thus enhancing workplace safety. The system integrates wearable technology with a user-friendly interface, providing magnetometer-free orientation estimation, joint angle measurements, and WMSDs risk evaluation. Tested in a cable manufacturing facility, the system was evaluated with ten female employees. The evaluation involved work cycle identification, inter-subject comparisons, and benchmarking against standard WMSD risk assessments like RULA, REBA, Strain Index, and Rodgers Muscle Fatigue Analysis. The evaluation demonstrated uniform joint patterns across participants (ICC=0.72±0.23) and revealed a higher occurrence of postures warranting further investigation, which is not easily detected by traditional methods such as RULA. The experimental results showed that the proposed system's risk assessments closely aligned with the established methods and enabled detailed and targeted risk assessments, pinpointing specific bodily areas for immediate ergonomic interventions. This approach not only enhances the detection of ergonomic risks but also supports the development of personalized intervention strategies, addressing common workplace issues such as tendinitis, low back pain, and carpal tunnel syndrome. The outcomes highlight the system's sensitivity and specificity in identifying ergonomic hazards. Future efforts should focus on broader validation and exploring the relative influence of various WMSDs risk factors to refine risk assessment and intervention strategies for improved applicability in occupational health.

Design and Experimental Characterization of L-CADEL v2, an Assistive Device for Elbow Motion.

An experimental characterization is presented for an improved version of a wearable assistive device for elbow motion. The design is revised with respect to requirements for elbow motion assistance, looking at applications both in rehabilitation therapies and exercising of elderly people. A laboratory prototype is built with lightweight, portable, easy-to-use features that are verified with test results, whose discussion is also provided as a characterization of operating performance.

Continuum Robots: From Conventional to Customized Performance Indicators.

Continuum robots have often been compared with rigid-link designs through conventional performance metrics (e.g., precision and Jacobian-based indicators). However, these metrics were developed to suit rigid-link robots and are tuned to capture specific facets of performance, in which continuum robots do not excel. Furthermore, conventional metrics either fail to capture the key advantages of continuum designs, such as their capability to operate in complex environments thanks to their slender shape and flexibility, or see them as detrimental (e.g., compliance). Previous work has rarely addressed this issue, and never in a systematic way. Therefore, this paper discusses the facets of a continuum robot performance that cannot be characterized by existing indicator and aims at defining a tailored framework of geometrical specifications and kinetostatic indicators. The proposed framework combines the geometric requirements dictated by the target environment and a methodology to obtain bioinspired reference metrics from a biological equivalent of the continuum robot (e.g., a snake, a tentacle, or a trunk). A numerical example is then reported for a swimming snake robot use case.

Recent advancements in multimodal human-robot interaction.

Robotics have advanced significantly over the years, and human-robot interaction (HRI) is now playing an important role in delivering the best user experience, cutting down on laborious tasks, and raising public acceptance of robots. New HRI approaches are necessary to promote the evolution of robots, with a more natural and flexible interaction manner clearly the most crucial. As a newly emerging approach to HRI, multimodal HRI is a method for individuals to communicate with a robot using various modalities, including voice, image, text, eye movement, and touch, as well as bio-signals like EEG and ECG. It is a broad field closely related to cognitive science, ergonomics, multimedia technology, and virtual reality, with numerous applications springing up each year. However, little research has been done to summarize the current development and future trend of HRI. To this end, this paper systematically reviews the state of the art of multimodal HRI on its applications by summing up the latest research articles relevant to this field. Moreover, the research development in terms of the input signal and the output signal is also covered in this manuscript.

Toward Optimal Learning of the Gesture in Laparoscopic Surgery: Methodology and Performance.

Classical surgical education has to face both a forensic reality and a technical issue: to train a learner in more complex techniques in an increasingly short time. Moreover, surgical training is still based on an empirical hierarchical relationship in which learners must reproduce a sequence of actions in a situation of strong emotional pressure. However, the effectiveness of learning and its quality are linked to the emotional states in which learners find themselves. Among these emotions, epistemic confusion can be found that arises in complex learning situations where there is a cognitive imbalance related to the comprehension of the task, and which results from a rupture between the pre-established patterns of the learner and the new learning task. Although one knows that confusion can have a beneficial or a negative impact on learning, depending on whether it is well regulated or not, the factors that can influence it positively are still poorly understood. Thus, the objective of this experiment is to assess the impact of confusion on the learning of a surgical procedure in an augmented reality context and to determine if this impact varies according to the feedback given to the learners and according to the occurrence of disruptive events. Medical externs were recruited (N = 15) who were required to perform a suturing task on a simulator and whose performance was measured using a Motion Capture (MoCap) system. Even though the statistical analyzes did not allow a conclusion to be reached, the protocol already established makes it possible to consider a longer-term study that will allow (by increasing the number of sessions and the number of participants) more significant results to be obtained in order to develop new surgical learning protocols. This preliminary study opens a new field of research on the influence of epistemic emotions, and more particularly of confusion, which is likely to upset traditional surgical teaching, and is based on negative conditioning and strong emotions with negative valence as well as stress and coercion.

A Biomimetic Method to Replicate the Natural Fluid Movements of Swimming Snakes to Design Aquatic Robots.

Replicating animal movements with robots provides powerful research tools because key parameters can be manipulated at will. Facing the lack of standard methods and the high complexity of biological systems, an incremental bioinspired approach is required. We followed this method to design a snake robot capable of reproducing the natural swimming gait of snakes, i.e., the lateral undulations of the whole body. Our goal was to shift away from the classical broken line design of poly-articulated snake robots to mimic the far more complex fluid movements of snakes. First, we examined the musculoskeletal systems of different snake species to extract key information, such as the flexibility or stiffness of the body. Second, we gathered the swimming kinematics of living snakes. Third, we developed a toolbox to implement the data that are relevant to technical solutions. We eventually built a prototype of an artificial body (not yet fitted with motors) that successfully reproduced the natural fluid lateral undulations of snakes when they swim. This basis is an essential step for designing realistic autonomous snake robots.