External Therapeutic Device To Support Rehabilitation Of The Hand Following Trauma Or Surgery
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$175,000.00
Summary
The loss of hand function will affect every aspect of an individual’s life. This includes the ability to feed and care for themselves and the ability to work and participate in family life. For people recovering from problems such as trauma, burns or surgery affecting the hand, careful management of hand rehabilitation can influence the outcome for the patient significantly. In order to reduce the possibility of mobility difficulties occurring, including loss of joint range of motion, muscle and ....The loss of hand function will affect every aspect of an individual’s life. This includes the ability to feed and care for themselves and the ability to work and participate in family life. For people recovering from problems such as trauma, burns or surgery affecting the hand, careful management of hand rehabilitation can influence the outcome for the patient significantly. In order to reduce the possibility of mobility difficulties occurring, including loss of joint range of motion, muscle and tendon sheath adhesions or non-functional scar tissue formation, continuous passive motion (CPM) is often indicated. Additionally, for people with reduced mobility of the hand due to upper limb paralysis, such as those with cervical spinal cord injury, stroke, cerebral palsy or peripheral nerve injury, disregard for management of the maintenance of the joint range of motion of the effected hand will result in contracture and limited joint range of motion. Such syndromes will reduce hand function, which is already limited by paralysis, and will negatively affect potential outcomes for aggressive rehabilitation techniques, such as tendon transfer surgery and functional neuromuscular stimulation. Therefore, in such cases, CPM is also indicated. Current devices applying CPM have shown to be effective in minimising the syndromes indicated above and these results are summarised in the Background and Research Plan attached to this proposal. Unfortunately, the use of such devices is not always prescribed by clinicians. This is due, mainly, to the limitations of these devices that are in the marketplace. These limitations include lack of secure finger placement, lack of portability, the inability to provide specialised therapy to specific joints and inflexible programming. This proposal introduces an improved device to be developed and these improvements form the proposal aims below. Given such an improved device, which can overcome many of the problems with current CPM machines, it is likely that that the clinical application of CPM will achieve the greater degree of prescription and application in hand rehabilitation. These improvements should overcome the clinical reticence to use these devices and restore a balance by increasing their use to the level that the scientific literature indicates they should have. The overall aim of the proposal is to take the device to a stage where it is ready for clinical trial.Read moreRead less
Information Encoding By Temporal Structure Of Afferent Spike Trains
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$231,175.00
Summary
Our ability to sense, discriminate and interpret touch stimuli underpins some of the most crucial functions of the human hand that relate to object exploration and manipulation. The fundamental mechanism of how nerve impulses generated by tactile receptors are interpreted by the nervous system is not understood. Only by discovering the underlying neural encoding mechanisms can we appreciate the functional impairments in patients and learn to identify them before they become widespread and irreve ....Our ability to sense, discriminate and interpret touch stimuli underpins some of the most crucial functions of the human hand that relate to object exploration and manipulation. The fundamental mechanism of how nerve impulses generated by tactile receptors are interpreted by the nervous system is not understood. Only by discovering the underlying neural encoding mechanisms can we appreciate the functional impairments in patients and learn to identify them before they become widespread and irreversible.Read moreRead less
Understanding impact of autonomous vehicles on behaviour and interactions. Understanding impact of autonomous vehicles on behaviour and interactions. This project aims to explore three human factor issues critical to the successful deployment of automated vehicles: factors influencing driver choice of automated vehicle control; interactions between automated and manually controlled vehicles; and driver detection, recognition, and reaction to automated vehicle system failures. Automated vehicles ....Understanding impact of autonomous vehicles on behaviour and interactions. Understanding impact of autonomous vehicles on behaviour and interactions. This project aims to explore three human factor issues critical to the successful deployment of automated vehicles: factors influencing driver choice of automated vehicle control; interactions between automated and manually controlled vehicles; and driver detection, recognition, and reaction to automated vehicle system failures. Automated vehicles are predicted to be transformative, but their ultimate success and expected societal benefits will depend on drivers’ trust in them and on how people choose to use and interact with them. Insights from this research should prepare our society for more automated vehicles on the roadways.Read moreRead less
Investigating travel choice behaviour: a new approach. Since large monetary investments are involved in infrastructure decisions, it is of utmost importance that impacts of transport policies can be accurately predicted. The recent failures to forecast usage and revenues of toll tunnels in Australia illustrate this well. This project aims to contribute by producing improved practical behavioural models to predict responses to such transport policies to assist in better decision making. Further, ....Investigating travel choice behaviour: a new approach. Since large monetary investments are involved in infrastructure decisions, it is of utmost importance that impacts of transport policies can be accurately predicted. The recent failures to forecast usage and revenues of toll tunnels in Australia illustrate this well. This project aims to contribute by producing improved practical behavioural models to predict responses to such transport policies to assist in better decision making. Further, the project is expected to make several methodological contributions by for the first time merging methods from stated choice surveys, experimental economics, and naturalistic driving simulators in order to better investigate travel choice behaviour in realistic environments.Read moreRead less
A Road Out of Motion Sickness in Autonomous Vehicles. Autonomous vehicles have found to provide significant improvements in safety and efficiency, as well as the potential to comfortably engage in other activities including work and entertainment. Motion sickness is particularly a significant source of concern in this regard, with factors ranging from demographics, vehicle kinematics to in-vehicle designs affecting the likelihood of discomfort. This study aims to (1) understanding factors induci ....A Road Out of Motion Sickness in Autonomous Vehicles. Autonomous vehicles have found to provide significant improvements in safety and efficiency, as well as the potential to comfortably engage in other activities including work and entertainment. Motion sickness is particularly a significant source of concern in this regard, with factors ranging from demographics, vehicle kinematics to in-vehicle designs affecting the likelihood of discomfort. This study aims to (1) understanding factors inducing motion sickness in AVs (2) Evaluating individuals’ preferences between comfort and travel attributes (including in-vehicle tasks) (3) Develop and evaluate mitigation strategies for motion sickness in AVs. Insights from this research will help improve adoption of automated vehicles on the roadways.
Read moreRead less
Quantifying Ethics-related Metrics for Transport Network Systems. This project aims to identify ethics-related metrics for improving the design of transport network services, and augment the social benefits of transport systems to relevant user groups. This project is anticipated to conceive, implement and validate new methodologies to solve challenging optimisation problems aiming at promoting ethics in transport systems via the provision of incentives to transport services providers. The outco ....Quantifying Ethics-related Metrics for Transport Network Systems. This project aims to identify ethics-related metrics for improving the design of transport network services, and augment the social benefits of transport systems to relevant user groups. This project is anticipated to conceive, implement and validate new methodologies to solve challenging optimisation problems aiming at promoting ethics in transport systems via the provision of incentives to transport services providers. The outcomes of this project are expected to support the emergence of ethical transport systems and to address fundamental societal and economical challenges induced by utility-driven transport services. This project will help in positioning Australia as a global leader in the field of ethical transport network systems.Read moreRead less
Integrating Mobility on Demand in urban transport infrastructures. Australia’s major cities are substantially challenged for public transport services due to the dispersed and low population densities, and thus, roads are at or beyond their capacity. Smarter demand-responsive public transport services are therefore needed. This project studies the viability of such a service under a variety of scenarios.
Stable on-demand optimization for workforce and fleet logistics management. This project aims to conceive, develop and deploy innovative methodologies for stable on-demand workforce management and fleet logistics based on advanced decision-support systems. The outcome of this project will provide a new cloud-based real-time Optimisation Software-as-a-Service (OSaaS) platform that allows businesses to improve their productivity while reducing operating costs and their environmental footprint. Thi ....Stable on-demand optimization for workforce and fleet logistics management. This project aims to conceive, develop and deploy innovative methodologies for stable on-demand workforce management and fleet logistics based on advanced decision-support systems. The outcome of this project will provide a new cloud-based real-time Optimisation Software-as-a-Service (OSaaS) platform that allows businesses to improve their productivity while reducing operating costs and their environmental footprint. This is expected to support the manufacturing, retail, delivery and mobile fleets industries.Read moreRead less
A safety-preserving ecosystem for autonomous driving. In this project, Macquarie University will collaborate with UTS and SilverQuest to develop an innovative safety-preserving ecosystem for autonomous driving. This system will not only be adopted by SilverQuest’s customers (automotive companies) to secure their latest autonomous driving models, but also be commercialised as a toolset that can be plugged into existing autonomous vehicles to detect and prevent malicious attacks on autonomous driv ....A safety-preserving ecosystem for autonomous driving. In this project, Macquarie University will collaborate with UTS and SilverQuest to develop an innovative safety-preserving ecosystem for autonomous driving. This system will not only be adopted by SilverQuest’s customers (automotive companies) to secure their latest autonomous driving models, but also be commercialised as a toolset that can be plugged into existing autonomous vehicles to detect and prevent malicious attacks on autonomous driving models. The project will lead to two innovations: in theory design an attack detection and prevention ecosystem for autonomous driving and in application implement a safety analysis toolset for industry-scale autonomous systems.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE200101793
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$423,038.00
Summary
Quantifying and managing the network impacts of transport sharing services. This project aims to address the challenge of effectively modelling multiple transport sharing services (e.g., ridesharing and parking sharing) in a multimodal network, and efficiently operating these services, and incentivising people to use them. The project expects to generate new knowledge in shared transport by developing an innovative approach to systematically reproducing and optimising network impacts of sharing ....Quantifying and managing the network impacts of transport sharing services. This project aims to address the challenge of effectively modelling multiple transport sharing services (e.g., ridesharing and parking sharing) in a multimodal network, and efficiently operating these services, and incentivising people to use them. The project expects to generate new knowledge in shared transport by developing an innovative approach to systematically reproducing and optimising network impacts of sharing services on travel choices, sharing demand-supply matching patterns, movement trajectory features and traffic dynamics. Expected outcomes include new models and strategies to improve decision support for transport planners and operators. This should provide significant benefits for human mobility and city sustainability.Read moreRead less