RE: Team 7 Project Gantt Chart 9/24/15-11/8/15

Feedback:

1. Go ahead to start your project accordingly!
2. It takes too long to research equipment.
3. You can group ordering and shipping together.
4. The granularity of "Research Muscles and Nerves" needs to be reduced by dividing them into sub-tasks.
5. There are many overlapping tasks. You need to assign resource in order to see whether it is feasible. 

Team 7 STEM Seminar: Summer Research presentation

Lithu Muralee and Julian Wexer

https://drive.google.com/open?id=15nslpEYXCOXckMjCCdj_BepEgWsOnwYuGtUD_8KaGno

Team 7 Project Gantt Chart 9/24/15-11/8/15

Lithu Muralee and Julian Wexer

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B99dB96ERl-5NVhCeVlSUnNPSEk

RE: Initial Planning & Coordination

Project Description & Merits

Describe the project in your own words and list the possible contribution your project can have to advance the field of STEM or solve societal problems.

 Description

Mimicking muscular electrical signals by recording the electrical impulse from the action of one person and translating that to another person’s arm.

 Contribution

• Perform surgery if doctor is not there
• Learning to play an instrument
• Recording electrical signal from muscle

 

• What's the purpose/application of recording electrical signals from muscle?
• Brainstorm more about the potential applications of this technology?

Group/Team Communication

Who will be involved in your project (team) and relevant projects (group)? How to communicate effectively with each other? What are the tools for project collaboration?

 Group members

• Julian Wexer
• Lithu Muralee

 How to Communicate Effectively

• Text and Message one another
• Clearly outline goals

 Tools for Collaboration

• Splitting up work

•  Tools such as Google doc, Git Hub, etc.

Prior Work/Resource Inventory

Go to the Project Resource website to review the current resource and prior work. Update the page.

• Need more study about the prior work in this fields, and post them in the Resource page.

Technology Analysis

Identify the scientific and technical knowledge/skills involved in your project.

• Teamwork (e.g., Git Hub)
• Problem solving
• Coding (which language? which IDE?)
• Biology (e.g., structure and stimulation mechanism of the nerve cells)
• Muscle structure (and neural structure, especially the upper arm and hand)
• Electric signals (especially neural signals)
• EMG device and its operation principles
• TENS device and its operation principles 

• Needs to be more specific.

Competence

Identify skill sets, technical competence in your group, and list the missing ones which need to be acquired.

• Teamwork
• Problem solving
• Basic knowledge of human anatomy

Safety

Identify any safety issues regarding the build, use, store, and dispose of materials and tools

• Wrong electrical signal
• Electrical wires
• Glitch

• Needs to pay special attention to the safety restrictions of Transcutaneous Electrical Neural Stimulation (TENS) signals, and the process of apply the signals to human.

Equipment, materials & budget

List the key materials and equipment required for your project. Identify the key items needed to be purchased and their prices

• Electrodes
• EMG device
• Gel
• TENS device

 Links to Products

• https://backyardbrains.com/products/HHI
• https://backyardbrains.com/products/diyMuscleSpikerbox
• https://backyardbrains.com/products/muscleSpikerbox

Schedule

What are the goals/milestones/plans of your project in the next week? What are the task assignments for each team member?

 Goals for next week

Get a lot of information on the devices we need to carry our research - Lithu and Julian

•  Needs to be much more specific, including detailed tasks, schedule, resource, etc.

Initial Planning & Coordination

Project Description & Merits

Describe the project in your own words and list the possible contribution your project can have to advance the field of STEM or solve societal problems.

 Description

Mimicking muscular electrical signals by recording the electrical impulse from the action of one person and translating that to another person’s arm.

 Contribution

• Perform surgery if doctor is not there
• Learning to play an instrument
• Recording electrical signal from muscle

Group/Team Communication

Who will be involved in your project (team) and relevant projects (group)? How to communicate effectively with each other? What are the tools for project collaboration?

 Group members

• Julian Wexer
• Lithu Muralee

 How to Communicate Effectively

• Text and Message one another
• Clearly outline goals

 Tools for Collaboration

• Splitting up work

Prior Work/Resource Inventory

Go to the Project Resource website to review the current resource and prior work. Update the page.

Technology Analysis

Identify the scientific and technical knowledge/skills involved in your project.

• Teamwork
• Problem solving
• Coding
• Biology
• Muscle structure
• Electric signals

Competence

Identify skill sets, technical competence in your group, and list the missing ones which need to be acquired.

• Teamwork
• Problem solving
• Basic knowledge of human anatomy

Safety

Identify any safety issues regarding the build, use, store, and dispose of materials and tools

• Wrong electrical signal
• Electrical wires
• Glitch

Equipment, materials & budget

List the key materials and equipment required for your project. Identify the key items needed to be purchased and their prices

• Electrodes
• EMG device
• Gel

 Links to Products

• https://backyardbrains.com/products/HHI
• https://backyardbrains.com/products/diyMuscleSpikerbox
• https://backyardbrains.com/products/muscleSpikerbox

Schedule

What are the goals/milestones/plans of your project in the next week? What are the task assignments for each team member?

 Goals for next week

Get a lot of information on the devices we need to carry our research - Lithu and Julian

Research Task 2 (07/27/15 - 08/09/15)

Great to see you make some progresses! Please continue and finish up the left-over assignments from the previous task. Don't forget to conduct a thorough survey of the existing low-cost EMG machines. We are going to purchase one based on your study results.

EMG signal acquisition/processing and functional neuromuscular electrical stimulation are two brand new fields which we have never explored before. However, they are extremely active research fields in the past few years. Sometimes, by combining with robotics, they have started bearing fruits to profoundly impact people who have been amputated or paralyzed! The potential applications are even wider and waiting for you to explore!

* Whenever you come across good papers/websites/reports, don't forget to add them to the "Project Resource" page.

* Please take electronic notes while you are studying the materials, watching the videos, or browsing through the web.

* Make PowerPoint presentations based on your notes. We will start presentation at the beginning of the year.

   

Notes on EMG so far for Research Task 1

Notes on EMG

Lithu Muralee and Julian Wexer

-EMG stands for Electromyography
          -Electromyography is the experimental technique concerning the development, recording, and analysis of myoelectric signals

                    -Myoelectric signals are signals formed by physiological variations in the state of muscle fiber membranes

-Neurological EMG vs Kinesiological EMG

          -Neurological is an artificial muscle response from external electrical stimulation

          -Kinesiological is activation of muscles within specific tasks

                    -Within postural tasks, functional movements, work conditions, and treatment/training regimes

-Kinesiological EMG is an evaluation tool for applied research, physiotherapy/rehabilitation, sports training, and interactions of the human body to industrial products and work conditions

-Benefits of EMG are that it allows you to look into the muscle, allows you to measure muscular performance, helps decision making before and after surgery, documents treatment and training  regimes, helps patients tain their muscles, allows analysis to improve sports activities, and detects muscle response in ergonomic studies

-The motor unit is the smallest functional unit to describe the neural control of the muscular contraction process

-Motor unit defined as cell body and dendrites of a motor neuron, the multiple branches of its axon, and the muscle fibers that the neurons are applied to

-Brain can excite muscle fibers

-Resting potential of not contracted muscle fiber membranes is about -80 mV

-Neuron induces Na+ ions to flow into the muscle fiber membrane in depolarization, which is followed by repolarization, which restores the exchange of Na+ and K+ ions

-The Na+ influx causes the action potential in the muscle to go from -80 mV to +30 mV, depolarization occurs, and levels return to normal, but the excitation leads to a release of calcium ions, which causes the muscles to contract

-EMG measures the action potentials

-Electrodes are placed on the skin over a muscle and are spaced apart and depending on the space between them, the electrodes form a potential difference between them

-Motor unit action potentials or MUAPS are summed up to get a superposed signal

-Two most important mechanisms influencing  the magnitude and density of the observed signal are the recruitment of MUAPs and their firing frequency, which are the main control strategies to adjust the contraction process and modulate the force output of the involved muscle

-A raw EMG signal is an unfiltered and unprocessed signal detecting the superposed MUAPs.

-When a muscles is relaxed there is a baseline in the graph of raw EMG, but when the muscle is contracted, noise can be seen, with the averaged baseline noise not being higher than 3-5 microvolts, and with the target being 1-2

-Raw EMG spikes are of random shape, and the raw recording burst cannot be precisely reproduced in exact shape

-Tissue characteristics can influence the EMG signal, as electrical conductivity varies with tissue type

-The EMG detected can be from other muscles, which can influence the EMG signal, but this cross talk typically doesn’t exceed 10%-15%

-If the change of distance between the electrodes changes, the EMG signal is affected

-Outside electrical noise can impact the EMG signal reading