An advanced rehabilitation robotic system for augmenting healthcare.

Emerging technologies such as rehabilitation robots (RehaBot) for retraining upper and lower limb functions have shown to carry tremendous potential to improve rehabilitation outcomes. Hstar Technologies is developing a revolutionary rehabilitation robot system enhancing healthcare quality for patients with neurological and muscular injuries or functional impairments. The design of RehaBot is a safe and robust system that can be run at a rehabilitation hospital under the direct monitoring and interactive supervision control and at a remote site via telepresence operation control. RehaBot has a wearable robotic structure design like exoskeleton, which employs a unique robotic actuation--Series Elastic Actuator. These electric actuators provide robotic structural compliance, safety, flexibility, and required strength for upper extremity dexterous manipulation rehabilitation training. RehaBot also features a novel non-treadmill paddle platform capable of haptics feedback locomotion rehabilitation training. In this paper, we concern mainly about the motor incomplete patient and rehabilitation applications.

Human perception based video preprocessing for telesurgery.

Video transmission plays a critical role in robotic telesurgery because of the required high bandwidth and quality requirement. We propose an adaptive video preprocessing technique to accelerate the transmission of telesurgical video. Using this technique, the bandwidth can be reallocated adaptively from non-essential surrounding regions to the region of interest when preprocessed image sequences are passed to the video encoder, ensuring excellent image quality of critical regions (e.g. surgical landscape). The algorithm first generates a physiologically appropriate attention map which can be updated dynamically. Then, an adaptive edge-preserving image smoothing filter is utilized to remove insignificant features. The parameters of the filter are adjusted according to the attention map. Our experimental result shows that, with the preprocessing technique, over half of the bandwidth can be reduced while there is no significant visual effect at the site of remote observer.

Design of the next-generation medical implants with communication energy and ports.

In this work, we provide an effective solution to the communication and power supply problems in miniature medical devices implanted within the human body. The volume conduction property of the human tissue is utilized as a natural cable for the delivery of both information and energy. A practical design is presented consisting of a small, simple, and convenient external device called an energy pad.

The future of military medicine has not arrived yet, but we can see it from here.

Throughout history, military medical personnel have provided care for their comrades in arms, often at the expense of their own lives. For many centuries, these medical personnel have applied the highest available level of knowledge and technology to the care of their patients. This paper discusses the current state of the technological art for the care of combat casualties, and discusses some of the newest technology solutions currently being developed for the provision of field medical care. The ongoing efforts of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (MRMC), and the U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) are highlighted.