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Physiological studies of swallowing and the diagnosis and treatment of dysphagia are crucially dependent of detailed information of respiratory and feeding events. Home telemonitoring is of great interest in this area, where large numbers of people have long term conditions. The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) describe a new configurable instrument that can be used in ambulatory and telemedicine...
Heart rate variability is a non invasive and indirect measure of the autonomic control of the heart. Therefore, alterations to this control system caused by myocardial ischaemia are reflected in changes in the complex and irregular fluctuations of this signal. Multifractal analysis is a well suited tool for the analysis of this kind of fluctuations, since it gives a description of the singular behavior...
Arrhythmia is a major health problem and is the subject of much research and computational modeling. The impact of this research has been limited by the availability of human data and by difficulties in its translation to clinical practice. This paper describes an expert system for analysis of cardiac electrogram signals, detecting local activation and repolarization times using heuristic algorithms...
Sample Entropy (SampEn) is a nonlinear regularity index that requires the a priori selection of three parameters: the length of the sequences to be compared, m, the patterns similarity tolerance, r, and the number of samples under analysis, N. Appropriate values for m, r and N have been recommended in some cases, such as heart rate, hormonal data, etc., but no guidelines exist for the selection of...
The responsible pathological mechanisms of essential tremor are not yet clear. In order to understand the mechanisms of the central network its sources need to be found. The cortical sources of both the basic and first “harmonic” frequency of essential tremor are addressed in this paper. The power and coherence were estimated using the multitaper method for EEG and EMG data from 6 essential tremor...
Our objective is to analyze EEG signals recorded with depth electrodes during seizures in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. Usually, different phases are observed during the seizure process, including a fast onset activity (FOA). We aim to determine how cerebral structures get involved during this FOA, in particular whether some structure can “drive” some other structures. This paper focuses...
In this study, we target to automatically detect behavioral patterns of patients with autism. Many stereotypical behavioral patterns may hinder their learning ability as a child and patterns such as self-injurious behaviors (SIB) can lead to critical damages or wounds as they tend to repeatedly harm one single location. Our custom designed accelerometer based wearable sensor can be placed at various...
Obstructive sleep apnea/hypopnea Syndrome (OSAHS) is the most common form of Sleep Disordered Breathing (SDB) and it is estimated to affect approximately 6% of US adult population. Various methods have been proposed for the development of inexpensive screening methods to detect SDB to reduce the need for costly nocturnal polysomnography (NPSG). By using the existing air in the airway as an ultrasonic...
We present a new type of non-contact sensor for use in ambulatory cardiac monitoring. The sensor operation is based on a microwave Doppler technique; however, instead of detecting the heart activity from a distance, the sensor is placed on the patient's chest over the clothing. The microwave sensor directly measures heart movement rather than electrical activity, and is thus complementary to ECG....
This paper presents the development of new prismatic actuation approach and its application in human-safe humanoid head design. To reduce actuator output impedance and mitigate unexpected external shock, the prismatic actuation method uses cables to drive a piston with preloaded spring. By leveraging the advantages of parallel manipulator and cable-driven mechanism, the developed neck has a parallel...
This paper provides a first description of a multiscale systems modeling approach applied to the congenital birth defect known as the tetralogy of Fallot. The multiscale approach adopted owes a lot to the effort of the world-wide physiome consortium and the work of research groups within the European Union on the Virtual Physiological Human. Both a spatial scale and time scale are used to establish...
This study investigated the usefulness of the very low spectral content of single-channel airflow recordings to help in the diagnosis of the obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) syndrome. Additionally, we evaluated whether airflow frequency components in the 0.01 - 0.10 Hz band are linked with desaturations in blood oxygen saturation (SaO2) recordings due to apnea events. The relationship between changes...
Event-related potentials (ERPs) are one of the most informative and dynamic methods of monitoring cognitive processes, which are widely used in clinical research to deal a variety of psychiatric and neurological disorders as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This work proposes an extraction and selection methodology for discriminating between normal and pathological patients with ADHD...
Renal failure patients provide a good model of fluid overload with the process of hemodialysis leading to central hypovolemia. This study aims to assess if hemodialysis induces identifiable changes in ear photoplethysmographic waveform variability (PPGV). The results are based on data collected from 10 kidney failure patients undergoing regular hemodialysis; classified as either fluid removal or non-fluid...
In North America, an estimated 30,000 patients annually experience an aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). In approximately five percent of these patients, the hemorrhage is not visible on computerized tomography scans due to the inability to image blood at time intervals greater than 12 hours post symptom onset. For these patients (many of which have experience a sentinel hemorrhage that is...
Studies of obesity and eating disorders need objective tools of Monitoring of Ingestive Behavior (MIB) that can detect and characterize food intake. In this paper we describe detection of food intake by a Support Vector Machine classifier trained on time history of chews and swallows. The training was performed on data collected from 18 subjects in 72 experiments involving eating and other activities...
Dysphagia is a medical condition in which the safety or efficiency of eating and drinking is compromised. Thin, watery fluids flow too quickly through the oral anatomy during an abnormal swallow, pre-empting airway protective mechanisms, and potentially resulting in fluid entry into the lung. Dysphagia therapy consists of reducing flow speed during swallowing by increasing fluid viscosity using thickeners...
Surgeons on a daily basis improve or rescue human lives. Therefore, they should be provided with the most optimal tools so their skills are fully utilized. In this paper, we present such an optimized tool for surgeons who employ the Nuss procedure to correct pectus excavatum - a congenital chest wall deformity. The Nuss procedure is a minimally invasive procedure that results in the placement of a...
We implemented a portable smart pen system capable of detecting lapses in concentration during reading. An accelerometer and a microcontroller are embedded within a pen casing to record data as a user reads sections of text using the pen as a pointer. When a substantial pause in reading is detected, the system generates an appropriate warning or alarm. An accompanying software program can communicate...
Capsule endoscopes are effective diagnostic tools for the gastro intestinal tract disorders at patient's comfort. However the present capsule endoscopes lack efficient localization techniques to specify a pathological area that may require further diagnosis or treatment. This paper presents the development of a tagging module based novel method for the real-time localization of the site of interest...
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