General Information
| Student: | Nicholas Georgiou |
|---|---|
| Office: | CoRE 434 |
| School: | University of Virginia |
| E-mail: | nikos.geor08@gmail.com |
| Project: | Adaptive Neurorehabilitation Robotics For Children |
Project Description
This project focuses on a combination of neuroscience, robotics, and computer science. These topics will be used to work on neurorehabilitation robots (NRs) that can help patients with neurological conditions, that can result from a stroke or cerebal palsy. The patients have impaired ability in moving body parts such as their legs or arms. The NRs give optimal results when patients have cognitive engagement (CE) while perform highly repetitve tasks involving the affected body part. Considering the main focus of the project will be children, these highly repetitive tasks will be in the form of games. The NR will adapt to the patients' behavior or ability in order to maintain active participation from the patient and to encourage improvement. A key to improving the effectiveness of NR therapy is understanding the neurophysiological components to movement of specific body parts that can help brain plasticity and lead to better motor recovery, so another aspect of this project is developing a built-in measure of these components into the robotic system. So, the project will focus on developing comprehensive representations of CE when performing neurorehabilitation tasks during therapy and creating new adaptive rehabilitation strategies that can further help patients in their recoveries.
Weekly Log
- Week 1:
- This was my first week here at the DIMACS REU. I moved into the apartment and met with most of the other research students, as well as the program coordinator, Dr. Lazaros Gallos, and all of the other staff that was here to help if anything was needed. I also met with my mentor, Dr. Konstantinos Michmizos, at his Computational Brain (COMBRA) Lab here at the university. I met with a couple of graduate students that also work in the lab and perform research. A major part of this week involved familiarizing myself with the research that is performed in this lab, and I did this by reading several papers, watching videos, and reading a book involving the research material. I read Chapters 16 and 20 of the book "Neurorehabilitation Technology" which gave detail into Upper Extremity Robotic Therapy and Robot Administered Walking Therapy. I also read one of Professor Michmizos' papers which was called "Robot-Aided Neurorehabilitation: A Pediatric Robot for Ankle Rehabilitation". All of these readings gave me a greater understanding of the type of research that the lab does and how it works. I am excited to contribute to these efforts because it is extremely interesting to me and it is also a great cause.
- Week 2:
- This week I focused on better familiarizing myself with one of the languages that I need in order to code on the system: TCL/TK. I installed TCL/TK on my laptop and completed several tutorials on the language to better understand its syntax. In addition, I learned how to turn on the InMotion ARM Interactive Therapy System, and how to calibrate it and perform some basic commands and run some basic games on it. I also looked at and studied the code for the basic games to better understand how it works and how it connects with the system.
- Week 3:
- This week I began developing the game that we will use in the experiments later on in the project. This game is primarily in TCL/TK and has a little bit of Python in it is as well. I used some existing code of a previous game to help me get started. After that, I added my own code in order to develop a game that abided by the specifications of the project and that could help us with the experiments.
- Week 4:
- This week I continued developing the game to be used in the EEG Project. I am trying to make the game fulfill all of the requirements needed for the experiments to be run and recorded as they should. I continue to ask the graduate students and my mentor for any additional features of the game that might be needed, and add or remove features depending on what is necessary.
- Week 5:
- This week I began focusing on finding a way to log all of the required data from the game onto the robot. This took some exploring throughout the robot's documentation, but I was able to succesfully record all of the information. Some of the statistics and data that we needed were built into the robot's logging functions, however there were also some parameters that needed to be added as well.
- Week 6:
- This week I worked on getting the robot and the game ready for experiments with the graduate student. There were some changes that needed to be made to the game, but I learned how to set up the EEG, and also how to run the software that can sync the robot with the EEG signals. I then learned about how the EEG data can be used and inputted to a neural network.
- Week 7:
- This week I worked on verifying that the correct triggers were being sent to the EEG recording from the robot. Neelesh and I ran sample experiments without actual subjects to make sure that the values for the correct events occuring were being sent and were being correctly read by the EEG recording software. On top of this a correspondence needed to be found between the value sent by the robot and the values received and read in by the computer.
- Week 8:
- This week I worked on implementing an experimental protocol for the EEG program that I had developed. Instead of the graphical user interface (GUI) that I had previously created, a protocol with differing amount of trials and motions for the patient to perform was implemented. This had to be tested and experimented with to make sure that all data was being logged correctly and that the protocol ran as it should.
Presentations
Additional Information
- My Mentor
- The Lab