Surface electromyography to understand how muscles make you move
Muscles make you move! Thanks to the control of the Central Nervous System muscles activate in a coordinated manner and allow human movement. An impaired muscular activation doesn’t imply only a poor movement performance, but it often causes pain, disability, and consequently loss of quality of life. Today maintenance and/or restore of movement performance and reduction of pain and disability is a major social challenge. The need of novel and/or more effective treatments has fostered new technologies able to capture information about individual muscular activation. The only way to get deeper insight into muscular activation during freely performed movements is related to surface-electromyography (sEMG) that is a non-invasive and pain free technique.
In the last years scientists and technicians are working to take sEMG out of the laboratories and to bring it into everyday life. In future, technological advances will make possible the development of a variety of equipment allowing consumers to monitor muscular activation. These ready-to-use technologies are increasing rapidly driven by technological innovation and will enable sEMG measurements in several new applications such as monitoring activity, biofeedback in rehabilitation, control of assistive devices. However, the correct extraction and interpretation of the gained data remains a challenge even for experienced scientists. To promote the utilization of this valuable technique some crucial points in data acquisition, processing and interpretation will be discussed by an application-based point of view.
Urinary pCO2 (U-pCO2) Monitoring System with a Planar Severinghaus Type Sensor for the Care of Sepsis/Septic Shock Patients in the Intensive Care Unit
Sepsis is the most frequent diagnosis in medical intensive care units (ICU) and one of the most common causes of death in hospitals worldwide. The prognosis of a patient in shock, correlates better with microcirculatory status compared to traditional parameters like mean arterial pressure (MAP). Monitoring U-pCO2 may provide timely recognition of changes in the microcirculatory status of patients and used as an “early” warning of metabolic-cellular dysfunction. Since many patients with septic shock already have indwelling Foley catheters, sampling urine is convenient without added risk for the patient. Unfortunately, conventional pCO2 sensors and pCO2 probes which are is frequently used in critical care management are too large or function poorly in urine.
With the aim of monitoring pCO2 levels in the urine of catheterized septic shock patients, a miniature planar U-pCO2 sensor was built on a screen-printed DropSensÒ chip. The sensor was implemented in a ~ 20 L flow cell and tested in a flow system, both in continuous flow and stopped flow modes. The utility of the U-pCO2 sensor has been demonstrated in measuring the CO2 levels in mock samples (buffer or urine) and in monitoring experiments performed in a model bladder. In the tutorial the requirements for urinary pCO2 measurement, the challenges of building planar ion-selective and gas sensors and the optimization of the measurement protocol will be discussed with data demonstration the agreement between U-pCO2 values measured with the planar pCO2 probe and a commercial pCO2 probe in pooled urine samples.
Charge Measuring Electronics in Medical Applications
Low-noise current and charge sensing circuits are pivotal in a large variety of biomedical instruments, spanning from electrochemical biosensors to photodetectors for visibile and gamma radiation. In this tutorial, the common design challenges and guidelines will be discussed, with special focus on front-end CMOS ASICs. Applicative examples will focus on diagnostics, both from the (apparently opposite) perspectives of nano-biosensors, leveraging molecular affinity (miniaturized and integrated with lab-on-chip microfluidics), as well as hospital-based scanners for medical imaging. Advances and technical solutions to achieve compatibility of sensitive detection circuits with large magnetic fields enabling multi-modal medical imaging and diagnostics will be presented.
A Gentle Introduction to DOE
DOE means design of experiments. When one wants to infer information from the reality, one has to compute statistics from data. These data may have been harvested from observations or they may be the yield of a designed experiments. It is this second case that we will talk about during the seminar.
When designing an experiment, the objective is to obtain data that will allow the researcher to bring a clear conclusion: what parameters of the experiment are of importance? Is the interaction between two parameters contributing to the phenomenon or conversely diminishing the individual effects of the parameters? Where is the optimal response? Where is the phenomenon most stable?
This tutorial will show through three simple cases, how this can be implemented in an experiment. The objectives are to show what type of benefit this type of methodology can bring when applied to your domain of investigations.
