Smart clothes and bionic prostheses
MEPhI learned to read muscle signals
Scientists and engineers at the site of the National Research Nuclear University "MEPhI" (NRU MEPhI) have developed a device "Mio-interface" capable of reading the electrical activity of muscles and converting it into signals. The development is planned to be used to create rehabilitation simulators, smart clothes for athletes with ECG reading and other indicators, a bionic prosthetic arm control system, as well as for remote control of a smartphone and a smart home system.
"Mio-interface" is a human-machine interface project that removes the electrical activity of the muscles of the hand, recognizes gestures and converts them into commands for devices, said Bulat Aitbayev, a graduate student of the Higher School of Engineering at MEPhI.
""Mio" is translated from Greek as "muscle". The electrodes register electromyographic signals from the muscles, then the interface uses special algorithms to recognize movement patterns and translate them into commands for the technique," he told RIA Novosti.
Specialists have been working on the project since 2015. Mio-Interface won a grant from the Start-1 Innovation Promotion Fund for 2 million rubles. These funds were used to assemble a laboratory prototype capable of recognizing up to eight user gestures.
In 2017 , the project won in Generation-S pre-accelerator and took first place in the nomination "Innovations in business" of the competition "Innovative Radio Electronics". In 2018, he became the winner of the Chinese-Russian industrial innovation award "Innovation Awards".
Recently, developers have assembled a new, standalone version of the device in the form of a bracelet with power and bluetooth modules, which contains an inertial module – a gyroscope and accelerometers.
"The advantage of our development, in comparison with analogues, is the high accuracy and low latency of device recognition, as well as the ability to use a fairly wide range of different recognition algorithms," Bulat Aitbayev commented.
From the laboratory prototype, the authors of the device are going to make a control system for a bionic upper limb prosthesis and additions to the motion tracking system in virtual and augmented reality.
They also managed to overcome the problem in which the recognition algorithms stopped working after removing and re-putting on the array of electrodes. This reduces the pre-setup time. In the future, it is planned to register intellectual property and find industrial partners for the implementation of the project.
The development of the MEPhI Research Institute can also be used to create rehabilitation simulators for recovery after stroke and other injuries that temporarily paralyze the patient; smart clothes for athletes with reading of ECG, EMG and other indicators, as well as as a remote control device for technical devices – a smartphone and a smart home system.
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