EditorialMedical Mechatronics for Healthcare

Yi-Hung Liu ,1 David Moratal ,2 Javier Escudero ,3 and Han-Pang Huang4

1Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan2Department of Electronics Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain3School of Engineering, Institute for Digital Communications, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK4Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

Correspondence should be addressed to Yi-Hung Liu; yhliu@ntut.edu.tw

Received 27 November 2017; Accepted 27 November 2017; Published 18 April 2018

Copyright © 2018 Yi-Hung Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Advances in the healthcare technology have positioned bio-medical technology as a major driver in global knowledge-based economies. A successful healthcare interventiondepends on not only the capability or experience of cliniciansbut also the adequacy of medical instruments and assistivedevices. In addition, the technical aids and assistive devicesfor elderly or people with severe motor disability are gettingmore attention due to our aging society all over the world,and they are widely used in daily life. As a result, medicalmechatronics becomes an important emerging technologyto improve healthcare. Medical mechatronics is the integra-tion of technologies and knowledge from various domains[1], including biosignal sensing fusion, real-time clinical dataanalysis, electric and mechanical system design, assistive/rehabilitation robot development, and machine/deep learn-ing algorithms. Although medical mechatronics has provento be successful in healthcare applications, there still remaindifficulties and challenges to overcome. For example, mostprevious assistive devices/robots were developed to providepatients with rehabilitation training in hospitals. With therapid growth of aging population, these assistive devicesare required to have smaller size and cheaper productioncost and be safer in order to meet the requirement ofin-house rehabilitation [2]. As a result, the medical mecha-tronic components in these assistive devices/robots need tobe redesigned.

The goal of this special issue is to bring together theresearchers in these fields and present high-quality researchon recent developments on medical mechatronics and

novel applications of medical mechatronics in healthcare,as well as the relevant prospect on opportunities and chal-lenges. The selected eleven papers underwent a rigorousrefereeing and revision process. Most of the studies werecarried out on clinical data, which provides the resultsreported in this special issue a high confidence level. More-over, most of the papers in this special issue include mecha-tronics and healthcare experts as coauthors, which isbeneficial to open new methods and issues to medical expertsin this multidisciplinary field.

2. The Special Issue

Stroke is a leading cause of long-term disability, and virtualreality- (VR-) based stroke rehabilitation is effective inincreasing motivation and the functional performance inpeople with stroke. Although much of the functional reachand grasp capabilities of the upper extremities is regained,the pinch movement remains impaired following stroke. Inthe study by S.-C. Yeh et al., a haptic-enhanced VR systemis proposed to simulate haptic pinch tasks in order to assistin long-term poststroke recovery of upper extremity finemotor function. Their results also suggest that this systemis also effective under certain challenging conditions suchas being in the chronic stroke phase or a coside of lesionand dominant hand (nondominant hand impaired).

In addition to VR-assisted rehabilitation, rehabilitation/mobile robot plays also a critical role in healthcare. This spe-cial issue collects a set of papers involving rehabilitation/healthcare robots. Ankle rehabilitation exercises act animportant role in recovering walking ability of patients after

HindawiJournal of Healthcare EngineeringVolume 2018, Article ID 9675482, 3 pageshttps://doi.org/10.1155/2018/9675482

stroke. Currently, patients mainly perform ankle exercise toreobtain range of motion (ROM) and strength of ankle jointunder therapist assistance by manual operation. However,most of the rehabilitation devices focus on ankle functionaltraining and ignore the importance of neurological rehabili-tation in the early hemiplegic stage. Q. Liu et al. developeda novel robotic ankle rehabilitation platform to assist patientsin executing ankle exercise. This robotic platform consists oftwo three-DOF symmetric layer-stacking mechanisms,which can execute ankle internal/external rotation, dorsiflex-ion/plantarflexion, and inversion/eversion exercises whilethe rotation center of the distal end of the robotic platformalways coincides with patient’s ankle pivot center. Y. Fenget al. proposed a new applicable and effective sitting/lyinglower limb rehabilitation robot (LLR-Ro), which has amechanical limit protection, an electrical limit protection,and a software protection to prevent the patient from beingsecondary damaged. As a new type of the rehabilitationrobots, its hip joint rotation ranges are different in the patientsitting training posture and lying training posture. Themechanical leg of the robot has a variable workspace to workin both training postures. In addition, to eliminate accidentinteraction force between patients and LLR-Ro in the processof the passive training, an amendment impedance controlstrategy based on position control is also proposed toimprove the compliance of the LLR-Ro. On the other hand,mobile robotics is a potential solution to home behaviormonitoring for the elderly. For a mobile robot, there are sev-eral types of uncertainties for its perceptions, such as theambiguity between a target object and the surroundingobjects. The problem could be more serious for a homebehavior monitoring system, which aims to accurately recog-nize the activity of a target person, in spite of these uncer-tainties. W. Yu et al. proposed a new strategy of activesensing, called active sensing with categorized further explo-rations. It detects irregularities and categorizes situationsrequiring further explorations, which strategically maximizesthe information needed for activity recognition while mini-mizing the costs. Two schemes of active sensing, based ontwo irregularity detections, namely, heuristic-based andtemplate-matching-based irregularity detection, were imple-mented and examined for body contour-based activity recog-nition. Their proposed approach can guide the robot systemto sense the target person actively and achieve high accuracyof activity recognition.

Biceps brachii muscle illness is one of the common phys-ical disabilities that requires rehabilitation exercises in orderto build up the strength of the biceps brachii muscle after sur-gery. It is also important to monitor the condition of thatmuscle during the treatment or rehabilitation exercise. Elec-tromyography (EMG) is one of the preferred methods formeasuring and recording the activity of the biceps brachiimuscle, and wavelet transform (WT) has been widely usedas a temporal-spectral analysis method for monitoringEMG signals. However, WT parameter selection remains achallenging task. N. Burhan et al. analyzed and investigatedthe selection of the best mother wavelet (MWT) functionand depth of the decomposition level in the wavelet denois-ing EMG signals of the biceps brachii muscle. The efficacy

of the wavelet denoising signal was determined through ananalysis of the activity of the biceps brachii muscle for vice-narians during the rehabilitation exercise.

Overnight polysomnography (PSG) is a standard diag-nostic procedure for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). However,there are no sensor systems to hook up with PSG for accuratehead position monitoring available clinically. W.-Y. Lin et al.presented a CORDIC- (COordinate Rotation DIgital Com-puter-) based tilting sensing algorithm to quickly and accu-rately convert accelerometer raw data into the desired headposition tilting angles. Their system can hook up with PSGdevices for diagnosis to have head position information inte-grated with other PSG-monitored signals. It has been appliedin an IRB test in Taipei Veterans General Hospital and beenproved that it can meet the medical needs of accurate headposition monitoring for PSG diagnosis. In addition to thehead-posture monitoring during sleep, vibration conditionmonitoring is also a crucial factor in sleep study. H. Kimuraet al. developed a new mechanical bed for inducing sleep toinvestigate the effects of different vibration conditions. Thenew bed has two active DOFs, vertical and horizontal direc-tions, to examine the anisotropy of sensation. The bedincludes three main parts: a vertical driver unit, horizontaldriver unit, and unique 2-DOF counterweight system. Dueto the new counterweight system, the required torque isextremely small and the driving sound is suppressed to lessthan 40 dB. Their results have suggested the ability of appro-priate vibration to induce sleep.

C.-H. Kuo et al. proposed an oscillometric blood pressure(BP) measurement approach based on the active controlschemes of cuff pressure. Compared with conventional elec-tronic BP instruments, their proposed BP measurementapproach is based on the utilization of a variable-volumechamber which can better actively and stably alter the cuffpressure during inflating or deflating cycles, because thevariable-volume chamber could significantly eliminate theair turbulence disturbance during the air injection stagewhen compared to an air pump mechanism. C.-Y. Lin andP.-J. Hsieh developed an automatic dispensing system forChinese herbal decoctions with the aim of reducing man-power costs and the risk of mistakes. They employedmachine vision in conjunction with a robot manipulator tofacilitate the grasping of ingredients. An offline least squarecurve fitting method was used to calculate the amount ofmaterial grasped by the claws and thereby improve systemefficiency as well as the accuracy of individual dosages. Theirexperiments on the dispensing of actual ingredients havedemonstrated the feasibility of their proposed system.

In the study of A. Chromy and O. Klima, a 3D scanmodel and thermal image data fusion algorithms are pre-sented. At present, medical thermal imaging is still consid-ered a mere qualitative tool enabling us to distinguishbetween but lacking the ability to quantify the physiologicaland nonphysiological states of the body. Such a capabilitywould, however, facilitate solving the problem of medicalquantification. Accordingly, they proposed a generally appli-cable method to enhance captured 3D spatial data carryingtemperature-related information. Their method can be uti-lized for high-density point clouds or detailed meshes at a

2 Journal of Healthcare Engineering

high resolution but is conveniently usable in large objectswith sparse points. Also, the technique offers a wide applica-tion potential in medicine and multiple technologicaldomains, including electrical and mechanical engineering.

Acknowledgments

The guest editors of this special issue would like to thank allauthors of the submitted papers, as well as all reviewers fortheir hard work and detailed reviews that led to elevenaccepted papers.

Yi-Hung LiuDavid MoratalJavier Escudero

Han-Pang Huang

References

[1] S. Katsura,W. Iida, and K. Ohnishi, “Medical mechatronics—anapplication to haptic forceps,” Annual Reviews in Control,vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 237–245, 2005.

[2] H. P. Huang, Y. H. Liu, W. C. Lee, J. Y. Kuan, and T. H. Huang,“Medical mechatronics: part I - rehabilitation robotic prosthe-ses for upper extremity,” in Contemporary Issues in System Sci-ence and Engineering, M. C. Zhou, H.-X. Li, and M. Weijnen,Eds., Wiley-IEEE Press, New York, USA, 2015.

3Journal of Healthcare Engineering

International Journal of

AerospaceEngineeringHindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

RoboticsJournal of

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Active and Passive Electronic Components

VLSI Design

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Shock and Vibration

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Civil EngineeringAdvances in

Acoustics and VibrationAdvances in

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Journal of

Advances inOptoElectronics

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com

Volume 2018

Hindawi Publishing Corporation http://www.hindawi.com Volume 2013Hindawiwww.hindawi.com

The Scientific World Journal

Volume 2018

Control Scienceand Engineering

Journal of

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com

Journal ofEngineeringVolume 2018

SensorsJournal of

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

International Journal of

RotatingMachinery

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Modelling &Simulationin EngineeringHindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Chemical EngineeringInternational Journal of Antennas and

Propagation

International Journal of

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Hindawiwww.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Navigation and Observation

International Journal of

Hindawi

www.hindawi.com Volume 2018

Advances in

Multimedia

Submit your manuscripts atwww.hindawi.com