Sharif Digital Repository

Sign language is recognized by considering the combination of the hand gesture, orientation, location and patterns of hand and arm movement. These complex interactions make the character and word recognition very challenging. In this paper, with the aid of sensory gloves and multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) we measure the shoulder and elbow joint trajectories and hand gesture to train the discriminant functions to recognize the words intended and represented by sign language. For recognition of hand gesture, the Naive Baysian classifier was used while for Eulerian angles a new time series similarity measures were computed. Different aggregation method was used to integrate temporal... 

Low Back Pain is one of the most problems in health domain which has a high treatment costs, also has high recurrence rates. Postural stability has been introduced as a health characteristic for musculoskeletal systems. Body stability is maintained with sensory feedback data such as Eyes, Vestibular and proprioception data which are sent to brain. Prior investigations have shown that proprioception data have many disorders in lumbar area of Low Back Pain patient and this data are not sent to brain encounters so many problems for muscle activation and stability of body. Researches have been indicated that Low Back Pain patients rely on Ankle proprioception more than healthy people and less... 

Obesity is a worldwide growing health challenge affecting ~30% of the world's population. Increased rate of disc degeneration and herniation, low back pain and surgery has been reported in obese individuals. Although obesity-related low back diseases have multifactorial etiology, presumably greater mechanical loads on the spine of heavier individuals during their daily activities may be considered as a risk factor. Likely larger trunk muscle sizes, disc sizes and thus passive stiffness in heavier individuals may however partly or fully offset the effect of their additional body weight on the spinal loads. In absence of in vivo approaches, the present study aims to construct subject-specific... 

Due to adverse health problems with lumbar spine among professional drivers associated with exposure to whole body vibration (WBV), studying the effect of vibrations and parameters influencing WBV is of great importance. This study aims to simulate whole body vibration for a ground vehicle occupant and calculate loads that lumbar spine tolerate during harmonic sinusoidal vibrations. Moreover, this study determines the effect of lumbar spine angle, seat specifications (angles and materials), and vibration frequency on the results. To this end, a detailed viscoelastic lumbar spine (L1-S1) has been modeled using FE method which has been replaced with the simplified spine model in HYBRID III... 

Knee pain and injuries are very common in athletes. Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury is one of the most important reason of knee acute and chronic pains. As ACL plays a significant role in knee stability and due to amount of reported ACL related injuries, much effort has been placed on finding proper and on time diagnosis and treatment of these injuries. Arthrometric methods are the most non-invasive reliable diagnosis option; however they are not fully capable of separating partial injuries from intact joint. This weakness can be investigated by quantifying the tests using computer simulations; so far few studies have been conducted toward this goal. In this study a two dimensional... 

Low back pain (LBP) problems are of concern to many researchers specially physiologists, biomedical engineers and... .biomechanical models can help us to furthering our knowledge of the mechanical characteristics of the spine and its neural control to know more about potential mechanisms of injury. This thesis involves computational model of lumbar spine to generate and control its flexion-extension movement.
Model has involved 7 links: 5 lumbar vertebrae, pelvis and trunk. Desired trajectory has been generated for rhythmic and discrete motion by the central pattern generators (CPGs). And then controller has produced torque of joints to track desired trajectory. CPGs have been... 

Injuries of neuro-musculoskeletal system impose large costs to the modem societies. Studying the strategies of CNS in planning and control of movements can be helpful in developing diagnoSiS, prognosis and treatment procedures in clinical view and also in designing rehabilitation system and humanoid robots. Tow important features of human movements are redundancy problem and structured variability. Previous studies solved the redundancy problem mainly with optimization methods. Also optimal feedback control theory is the only method that successfully modeled structured variability in voluntary movements. Despite the appropriate outputs this methods are not based on physiological facts... 

A single-degree-of-freedom model is considered for flexible exercise bars based on the lumped-element approach. By considering the side segment of a flexible exercise bar as a cantilever beam with an equivalent mass at the free end, its free-vibration response and forced one under excitation of the grip of the flexible bar is written parametrically. Some experiments are performed on a specific flexible bar to obtain numerical values for the parameters in the model to have it quantitatively known. In the next step, simulation of the model results in the response of the flexible bar under a considered excitation. The response is imported into a multi-segment musculoskeletal software, AnyBody,... 

Several geometrically-detailed passive finite element (FE) models of the lumbar spine have been developed and validated under in vitro loading conditions. As these models are devoid of muscles, they are either not used to simulate in vivo activities or muscle forces are modeled by a hypothetical compressive follower load (FL). A number of symmetric and asymmetric static tasks were first simulated using a validated musculoskeletal model of the thoracolumbar spine to predict trunk muscle forces. The predicted muscle forces along with the gravity loading were then applied to a passive FE model of the L4-L5 motion segment (developed and validated here) to estimate load sharing among the disc,... 

In this project we plan to propose a mechanism for controlling the profile of vertebra displacment and intera-discal pressure in in-vitro tests. Spineis the one of the most important members of the human musculoskeletal system. Health and stability of the spine help the people to moves on two legs. So any problems with this organ, causing movement problems and pain. For the treatment of spinal diseases, several methods such as surgery, insertion of implants and stabilizing were used. To ensure the accuracy of these methods, laboratory examination is essential. One of the ways to test these interventions, the implementation of in vitro tests on samples obtained from the bodies of the spine.... 

One of the most common diseases associated with musculo-skeletal ailment is low back pain which is epidemic among general public so that billions of dollars is spent annually to treat this disease. There are back pain prevention strategies include training on correct lifting, ergonomic tool design, and industrial automation amongst others. In recent years, assistive devices have also been used to prevent back pain. There are assistive devices that can be installed on the body and significantly have reduced forces required for Erector Spinae muscle and Lumbar moments. In this research, at first the anatomy of the spine and muscles and method of processing Electromyography (EMG) of muscles... 

Biomechanical models are indispensable tools in predictions of muscle forces and joint loads towards design of prevention and treatment programs. In most of these models intervertebral joints are modeled as hinge joints thus neglecting the existing translational degrees of freedom (DOFs). This simplification can alter the results of the model as changes in model kinematics affect the prediction of the joint and muscle forces. The current study aims to evaluate the likely effect of this simplification on the predictions of the musculoskeletal model of AnyBody Modeling System (AMS) for muscle forces and spinal loads. Clinical application of this study is in assessing the limitation of... 

Manual material handling (MMH) activities are identified as risk factors for occupational low back pain (LBP). Task-related variables including load and posture characteristics are required as input into these models and tools for estimation of trunk external moment. Biomechanical modeling studies that aim to mathematically estimate low back loads currently need an inevitable parallel time-consuming in vivo study in an equipped laboratory to measure trunk posture under physical activities. Inertial sensors as a portable, accurate, almost inexpensive, and small device could be very helpful in order to capture the kinematic data of movement in human activities. My master thesis aims to... 

Shoulder is one of the most important joints of the body with high degrees of freedom. Synergic analysis of the shoulder muscles shows the joint condition due to applied force or torque. The results of the linear COP parameters and nonlinear analysis indicate the characteristics of subjects postural stability. The flexi-bar is a rehabilitation tool which stimulates the muscles. In this study, the effect of bar on the body has been examined. The modeling is carried out in two horizontal and vertical condition of bar in sixteen separate positions in the upper right side quadrant of the model. Muscle activation and joint stiffness, force and torque were obtained. COP data in AP and ML were... 

Spine column is the most important musculoskeletal structures. One of the serious health problems in societies, especially among aged population is osteoporosis. Loss of bone density in bone structures is called osteoporosis which increases the risk of fracture due to a decrease of bone stiffness and bone strength. Spine is the most common sites for osteoporosis-related fractures. Current assessment of osteoporosis status is based on bone densitometry tools like QCT (Quantitative Computed Tomography) or DEXA (Dual Energy X-ray absorptiometry). With these methods it is only possible to estimate density without any consideration the morphology of trabecular making parts like rods and plates.... 

Low back pain is one the most prevalent disease and major economic issue facing modern countries. Epidemiological studies suggest that maximum trunk flexion, the angular velocity of trunk and the rate of repetitive movements (such as flexion-extension), are associated with low-back disorders. From biomechanical point of view, lack of stability during dynamic repetitive movements, increases the risk of injuries. On the other hand, some researchers suggest increasing motor variability could be an intrinsic factor to intervene muscuskeletal disorders during repetitive movements. Pace of repetitive occupational tasks could affect both, motor variability and dynamic stability. The goal of this... 

In this study, by dividing spine motion in two part, ordinary movement and initial-final accelerated movement, the commands of CNS are evaluated by optimization methods to find synchronous and time varying synergies. Spine, which is a complex structure of vertebrae and cartilage, has been modeled by a 3D inverted pendulum with a ball and socket joint at L4/L5 incorporated with 18 muscle fascicles. Planning of point-to-point spine motion is performed by optimal control method in combined with cost function of kinematics and kinetic features that available in spine structure. In the second step, coactivation of muscles is predicted by utilizing static optimization along with stability... 

In this project, we use a novel mechanism to control the lumbar rotational profile and also the disc pressure of L3/L4 and L4/L5. Spine, as one of the most important parts of human musculoskeletal system, helps human beings to walk on two feet without much energy consumption. Any problem in this part may cause moving disorders or pain. To heal severe spine disorders, many different methods like surgery and implantation are adopted. To be sure of proper functionality in the human body, these methods should be tested clinically in advance. Cadaver spine testing in vitro, is accepted as a gold standard to evaluate new methods. One of the main challenges facing spine in vitro tests is how to... 

In present study we are going to introduce a biomechanical model of lumbar spine with using finite element method and use it for evaluating the behavior of spine under different loading conditions.Spine as the main part of muskloskeletal system of human body is tolerating various forces during daily activities.So it's important to know about different approaches for studing the loading conditions wich is using for evaluating the behavior of lumbar implants. In other words in order to obtain correct outputs we need to simulate the real condition in the experiments. We can use biomechanical models in order to comparison the different approaches  

The importance of the motion measurement systems is obvious due to survey the number of people who have joint pains through wrong movements. Considering the medical device’s trend toward wearable systems, the necessity of portable measurement instruments which are independent from experimental setup, is undeniable. Motion measurement systems based on MEMS Inertial sensors are widely used these days because they are cheap and portable. However these systems have some defects such as error accumulation and increasing error due to magnetic disturbance or high acceleration motions. Multisensory data fusion along with compensator filters is the best solution in order to reduce these errors....