Difference between revisions of "Design of combined Ultrasound and Electromyography systems"

Revision as of 12:15, 13 June 2022

Short Description

Ultrasound (US) imaging is a non-invasive imaging technique that provides visible information on the structure of musculoskeletal tissues, organs, and vascular system. Recent research trends include the development of wearable US probes, with minimal power consumption and reduced count of piezoelectric elements. In fact, meaningful physiological information can be derived also from single-element transducers. Within this framework, at IIS we have recently developed an ultra-low power wearable US probe, based on an MSP430 and nRF52 microcontrollers, operating with a single US channel and consuming less than 20mW [1].

In the context of prosthetics control, the golden standard is set by surface electromyography (sEMG). However, relying only on a single data source (e.g., EMG) reduces the quality of a fine-grained motor control, and to address this limitation novel devices capable of capturing the electrical and mechanical behavior of muscles in a parallel and synchronized fashion have been proposed [2].

The scope of this project is to design an acquisition platform capable of collecting together and in a synchronized way US and EMG data. The ultra-low-power US probe of [1] and the BioWolf platform for ExG signals [3] will be considered as starting design points, and an integrated prototype merging together the features of such two systems will be designed.

Goal & Tasks

In this project, you will work on the extension of a novel wearable US probe [1] to capture also EMG signals, based on the golden-standard ADS1298 analog front-end for EMG signals. The main tasks are:

• Programming the NRF52 evaluation board to collect in a parallel and synchronized way US data (from an MSP430 MCU) and EMG data (collected with an ADS1298)
• PCB design of an integrated probe
• proof of concept experiments

Literature

• [1] Ultra low power wearable ultrasound probe
• [2] UStEMG: an Ultrasound Transparent Tattoo-based sEMG System for Unobtrusive Parallel Acquisitions of Muscle Electro-mechanics
• [3] BioWolf: A Sub-10-mW 8-Channel Advanced Brain–Computer Interface Platform With a Nine-Core Processor and BLE Connectivity

Prerequisites

• embedded C
• Python
• Microcontrollers
• PCB design

Status: In Progress

Lukas Kunz

Supervision: Sergei Vostrikov, Andrea Cossettini

Character

10% Literature Study

25% PCB design

65% Microcontroller programming

Professor

Luca Benini

Practical Details

• Project Plan
• Project Meetings
• Final Report
• Final Presentation

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