The contest invites undergraduates from all disciplines to propose ideas that can improve accessibility and inclusion for persons with disabilities and accepts a maximum of two submissions in each of five categories from each university based on issues identified in the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). This year, Carleton students have submitted: an affordable prosthetic hand (video above); an adjustable heigh wheelchair seat; a collection of products building on a hand-powered tricycle to explore accessibility and economic opportunities for people in Uganda; an offroad motorcycle for riders with lower limb disabilities; a dot navigation system for visually impaired athletes; and a presentation for students on IDeA.

Selected as a finalist is the low-cost 3D printed prosthetic hand with intelligent EMG control designed in the Department of Electronics as a fourth year project. The team of Tim Inglis, Alim Baytekin, Alborz Erfani and Natalie Levasseur were supervbised by Dr. Leonard MacEachern. The team will showcase the project at the Ontario Centres of Excellence Discovery 2013 Conference.

View this year’s submissions. In 2012, Carleton students won 1st and 2nd place.

Left to right: Al Perks, PEng, Judge Convener; Tyler Clancy, student, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; Frank Hendriksen, PEng, Student Papers Co-chair; Tim Inglis, student, Department of Electronics; Kim Eaton, PEng, Judge; Cynthia Cruickshank, assistant professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, PEO Student Papers Night Organizer

Congratulations to Tim Inglis (biomedical and electrical engineering) and Tyler Clancy (mechanical engineering) on their winning presentations at the PEO Papers Night on April 9. Inglis was awarded the best overall paper prize for the Bionic Hand and Clancy won for the best technical presentation for Flexures for the Formula Hybrid Car. The judges were significantly impressed both with the superb engineering technical aspects of their projects and their ability to present this to an audience in a fashion such that non-experts could understand their work.

Prof Cynthia Cruickshank, the faculty member responsible for the Carleton team, now has two consecutive wins after our team recaptured the Tom Foulkes Trophy, awarded by the Ottawa Chapter of PEO.

The Bionic Hand project, a 3D printed hand with intelligent EMG control, also took first place in the Department of Electronics, and second place in IEEE Ottawa Section – Carleton Branch.

“Coming from a third world country with poor health care, I always wanted to improve the quality of life and care back home,” says Chaugai. “I had heard that North American schools offer a good education in the field of biomedical engineering. Carleton was my top choice because the research carried out here catered to my interests and it’s also one of the most reputed institutions in Canada.”

Chaugai, who will graduate on November 10, is researching factors that affect the treatment of irregular heartbeats in the hopes that her research could eventually help save lives.

When people are experiencing abnormal heart rhythms, they are often given an electrical shock to restore a normal rhythm. That treatment is called defibrillation. In order for this to happen, sufficient electrical current needs to reach the heart. However, tissues (especially fatty tissues) can resist the flow of the electrical current. That property, which was the main focus of Chaugai’s thesis, is called impedance.

Chaugai explains that the electrical current conduction in the human chest is like the flow of water through a hose. Chaugai explains: “You can imagine the size of a hose as impedance and flow of water as current. If the size of the hose is small, lesser flow of water is seen and vice versa. Likewise, the amount of current that is going to reach the heart is dependent on the impedance of the body tissues.”

The novelty of Chaugai’s research is that it shows how the current travels in the chest and the way the impedance affects the current flow in the heart.

Chaugai worked with other researchers from Carleton and University of Ottawa Heart Institute.

Says Chaugai: “Our results suggest that it is going to be difficult to restore normal heart rhythm in larger patients with a high content of fat tissues, since the amount of current in the heart is going to be less. We also suggest a way to solve this problem, which is by changing the position of the electrodes through which the current is given to the chest.”

“These findings can be employed to improve the success rate of the treatment process in hospitals,” points out Chaugai. She says that the Electro-Physiology group and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute have shown strong interest in implementing the results of the research.

Chaugai says her supervisors, Drs. Andy Adler, Adrian Chan, andTimothy Zakutney, “are excellent researchers and their support and guidance have been invaluable throughout my studies. My overall experience in biomed at Carleton has been a process of learning, discovering and creating and has been one of the best experiences I have ever had.”

After she graduates, Chaugai is thinking of doing a PhD but also wants to apply her knowledge to help solve problems related to the biomedical industry.

More information about the Master of Applied Science in Biomedical Engineering.

Fraser grew up asking questions like − ‘How do nerve cells in the human brain process information?’

“I wanted to pursue a career that would allow me to combine technology and medicine,” says Fraser. So he decided to apply to Carleton’s Master’s of Applied Science (MASc) program in Biomedical Engineering. The main objective of this degree is to enhance students’ abilities to solve biological and medical problems through the application of engineering principles.

Fraser adds: “This program gives me a perfect opportunity to develop a background in working with biological signals and signal processing. These techniques are applicable to a wide variety of problem areas and are useful in continuing research in biomedical engineering.”

His present research looks at developing software that can be used by medical professionals to analyze data associated with muscle contractions.

Electromyograph signals (sEMG) are a measure of the electrical activities associated with muscle contractions. These signals are used to aid in the diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders, to control powered prosthetic limbs, or used in fatigue studies in exercise science, for instance.

Fraser points out that there can be a large source of error unless personnel in the medical settings are specifically trained in sEMG acquisition, especially since there is no universally used software to acquire and validate sEMG.

“We are hoping that by developing our software for CleanEMG, we can remove much of the uncertainty associated with sEMG acquisition and make it easier and less costly to acquire clean, reliable sEMG signals,” says Fraser. CleanEMG is an ongoing research collaboration between Carleton University and the University of New Brunswick to develop an open-source, user-friendly software tool to quantify noise in sEMG.

Fraser’s supervisors are Adrian Chan and James Green. “Both are very down-to-earth, very approachable and extremely knowledgeable in their areas,” says Fraser. “They are great researchers and both have received awards for teaching with the latest (and perhaps most prestigious) being Adrian’s 3M teaching award.”

Carleton’s MASc degree in Biomedical Engineering is a joint program between Carleton and the University of Ottawa, offered through the Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Biomedical Engineering (OCIBME). This is one of 12 joint institutes between Carleton and the U of O. OCIBME includes relevant engineering and science programs at Carleton.

Fraser says: “Biomedical Engineering at Carleton is great in that it is diverse enough that you have the freedom to select any courses that fit your interests and/or research area. It has a weekly seminar component where you get to listen to speakers talk about their research in biomedical engineering and learn more about just what is going on in the field. This is a perfect way to develop and appreciate the breadth of research that is done.”

He also would like to encourage undergrad students who are interested in the biomedical field to look into the NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) program. “It is an excellent opportunity to work with a professor and gain research experience during the summer. They pay you for your work as well so it really is a good experience. This is what I did the summer before I started grad school and it really helped me get acquainted with the professors that I would be working with and the type of work I would be doing.”

More information about all of our Joint Institutes can be found here.

The full story and original post can be found here. http://carleton.ca/fgpa/2012/grad-student-flexes-his-research-muscles

The project is an electro-myographic controller with gesture recognition. For laypeople, sensors on an arm band detect muscle signals to control a video game which provides visual feedback and makes repetitive rehabiliation exercises fun.

Read more on the project.

April 5, 2012

Carleton University students have designed a type of crash test dummy not seen before: a cyclist, designed to go over the handlebars at 25 km/h.

On Wednesday, after eight months of hard labour creating the nameless dummy, they had the satisfaction of loading it on a cart and launching it into trouble.

“We’ve been trying to simulate whether you would get a concussion from an over-the-handlebars-type accident,” said Evan Hayes, a fourth-year student in mechanical engineering. The 21 students in the group also come from aerospace and biomedical engineering.

Car-testing dummies, it seems, don’t tell what happens to people who are thrown off bicycles. The Carleton dummy is built to suffer in more ways than the conventional model, a Thor-NT device used widely in industry.

“The idea is that we should be able to throw this crash test dummy into whatever situation and get a reasonably accurate result, regardless of whether we know (in advance) what injuries we’re going to have,” Hayes said.

When engineers crash a car, they use one type of dummy for a frontal crash and a different type for a side impact. Neither is considered right for a cyclist who hits something or slams on the front brakes hard and flies over the handlebars.

This year the student team has concentrated on what happens to the head and neck of the cyclist. Arms and legs can break in a crash, but head injuries are a more serious risk.

The dummy wears a helmet. Like a human cyclist, though, it keeps the important stuff inside its head.

This includes one sensor that deforms under the force of impact, to show the stress that a real cyclist would endure.

There are also two accelerometers, devices that can measure any change in speed, either faster or slower.

In this case, they measure the sudden deceleration from 25 km/h to zero. Deceleration can cause concussions because the skull slows, but the brain’s momentum is still moving, making it slam against the skull.

There has been recent research suggesting that a helmet with a visor on the front may force the head to snap backward when it hits the ground, and that may contribute to a concussion. One of the accelerometers measures this movement as well.

The year was full of surprises: dummy parts from a factory that didn’t quite fit together, budgets that changed unexpectedly, insufficient time in the machine shop.

“Most people enjoy it. It is difficult, but it is a culmination and practical test of what we’ve been learning for the past four of five years,” Hayes said.

Besides, he says, it’s fun to make things crash.