{"title":"Guest Editorial BioRob2024","authors":"Leonardo Cappello;Daniele Guarnera","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3532156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3532156","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 1","pages":"3-5"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10908099","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143529882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics Information for Authors","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3539974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3539974","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 1","pages":"C4-C4"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10908100","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143521356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics Publication Information","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3539970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3539970","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 1","pages":"C2-C2"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10908102","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143529889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics Society Information","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3539972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3539972","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 1","pages":"C3-C3"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10908103","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143521462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Effect of User Learning for Online EEG Decoding of Upper-Limb Movement Intention","authors":"Matteo Ceradini;Stefano Tortora;Silvestro Micera;Luca Tonin","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3537663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3537663","url":null,"abstract":"Electroencephalography (EEG) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a promising way for individuals with motor impairments to control prosthetic or rehabilitation devices. Accurately decoding movement intention (MI) is crucial for translating subjects’ motor execution plans into action. Common challenges in EEG-based BCIs include performance discrepancies, often requiring frequent recalibration of decoding algorithms. The objective of this study was enhancing BCI decoding performance of upper-limb MI identification by exploiting both machine and subjects’ learning and maintaining stable decoding algorithms. Significant performance improvements were observed across most subjects from the first to the last session of the experiment. Some subjects also demonstrated stable performance without requiring any model recalibration between sessions. All subjects achieved high efficacy in online decoding of movement intention, as reflected in improvement of the F1 score from <inline-formula> <tex-math>$0.58pm 0.26$ </tex-math></inline-formula> in the first session, to <inline-formula> <tex-math>$0.84pm 0.13$ </tex-math></inline-formula> in the final session. We emphasize the critical importance of allowing users sufficient time to improve their performance in BCIs for upper-limb MI decoding. Unlike existing studies, we specifically evaluate the effect of stable decoding strategies in online and longitudinal BCI sessions, which are key to achieving more reliable and effective BCIs.","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 2","pages":"633-641"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10869338","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144084736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mahshad Berjis;Marie-Eve LeBel;Daniel J. Lizotte;Ana Luisa Trejos
{"title":"Selecting Muscles for Detection of Upper-Limb Compensatory Movements Using s-EMG Sensors","authors":"Mahshad Berjis;Marie-Eve LeBel;Daniel J. Lizotte;Ana Luisa Trejos","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3531015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3531015","url":null,"abstract":"Patients with upper-limb injuries often use compensatory movements to overcome limitations in range of motion, which can lead to additional injury if not corrected early within a rehabilitation program. Although automatic detection of compensatory movements has been studied in the literature, the impact of sensor locations on detection performance has not been previously explored. To investigate how sensor locations affect the ability to automatically detect compensatory movements of the upper limb, sixteen surface electromyography sensors were placed on key muscles involved in these movements. Thirty-one healthy participants performed a door-opening task in three conditions: without elbow restrictions (healthy pattern), and two conditions with limited elbow range of motion (60° of flexion-full flexion and 30°–80° of flexion to simulate injury). Statistical analyses identified sensor locations with significant differences between the conditions. Support vector machine classifiers demonstrated notably higher performance using data from six sensors on the middle deltoid, the upper trapezius, the latissimus dorsi, the external obliques, and the erector abdominis. This study highlights the importance of thoughtful muscle selection for effective automatic detection and correction of upper-limb compensatory movements, which is crucial for a wearable mechatronic device to be effective in improving the movement quality of patients.","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 1","pages":"164-170"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143529868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Michael West;Federico Tessari;Margaret Wang;Neville Hogan
{"title":"The Study of Dexterous Hand Manipulation: A Synergy-Based Complexity Index","authors":"A. Michael West;Federico Tessari;Margaret Wang;Neville Hogan","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3531006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3531006","url":null,"abstract":"In this work we tackle the question of how to analyze and objectively quantify the complexity of a manipulation task. The study investigates the kinematic behavior of the hand joints in three different manipulation tasks of growing complexity: reaching-to-grasp, tool use and piano playing. The collected data were processed to extract the kinematic synergies of the hand by means of singular value decomposition. A novel, unbiased metric to determine hand manipulation complexity was based on the cumulative variance accounted for. This Variance-Accounted-For Complexity Index (VAF-CI) reliably distinguished between different manipulation tasks. Moreover, an unsupervised learning method (k-means clustering) was able to use the index to accurately identify the 3 distinct manipulation tasks. These results may be leveraged to improve the control of biomimetic dexterous robots during manipulation tasks.","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 1","pages":"156-163"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143529876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Magnetorheological-Elastomer-Based and Hydraulically Steerable Actuator for Micro Guidewire and Catheter","authors":"Min Sung Kim;Chan Young Park;Doo Yong Lee","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3527718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3527718","url":null,"abstract":"The pressure-driven mechanisms for steerable guidewires and catheters are difficult to fabricate when miniaturized to submillimeter-scale. Micro bubbles resulting from molding or surface irregularities due to surface tension can affect the actuation performance as the outer diameter of the pressure-driven actuator decreases to the submillimeter-scale. This paper presents a novel fabrication method to manufacture pressure-driven actuators of submillimeter-scale. The proposed fabrication method utilizes magnetorheological (MR) elastomer and magnetic field to determine the geometric dimensions of the actuator with micro-scale precision. An actuator of the diameter of 0.7 mm and the eccentricity of <inline-formula> <tex-math>$80~mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula>m is designed and fabricated with absolute errors of <inline-formula> <tex-math>$12~mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula>m and <inline-formula> <tex-math>$3~mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula>m, respectively. The steering performance of the fabricated micro actuator is tested through experiments. The actuator can achieve a sharp bending angle of 124 degrees with a length of 5.41 mm, by optimizing the eccentricity through the finite-element analysis.","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 1","pages":"77-84"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143529870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lorenzo Campioni;Gianluca Dimonte;Giorgia Sciarrone;Gabriele Righi;Conor Walsh;Marta Gandolla;Giulio Del Popolo;Silvestro Micera;Tommaso Proietti
{"title":"Preliminary Evaluation of a Soft Wearable Robot for Shoulder Movement Assistance","authors":"Lorenzo Campioni;Gianluca Dimonte;Giorgia Sciarrone;Gabriele Righi;Conor Walsh;Marta Gandolla;Giulio Del Popolo;Silvestro Micera;Tommaso Proietti","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3527708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3527708","url":null,"abstract":"Spinal cord injuries (SCI) often lead to upper limb impairment, necessitating innovative solutions for daily assistance beyond traditional rigid robotics due to their impractical weight and size. Despite still preliminary, soft wearables are arising as a possible solution to fill this gap. Here, we demonstrated an enhanced version of a soft inflatable robot that assists the shoulder against gravity, previously tested with different neurological conditions. Noteworthy improvements include a single-layer actuator, simplifying manufacturing, a built-in bending angle and a nylon hammock, for better armpit conformity. We characterized the actuator (approximately <inline-formula> <tex-math>$8 Nm$ </tex-math></inline-formula> at 90° at <inline-formula> <tex-math>$70 kPa$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) and demonstrated its good transparency, both from a kinematic and a muscular standpoint. Then, on 11 healthy individuals, we showed reductions in shoulder muscle activity (both at the anterior and middle deltoid) while performing a lift and hold task, ranging from 16% to almost 60% of the maximum voluntary contraction. More importantly, we confirmed these effects on two SCI individuals SCI, at two different stages of recovery. While preliminary, considering the limited exploration of soft wearable robots for the shoulder in SCI cases, this is a significant advancement playing an important role in the development of future soft technology for SCI assistance.","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 1","pages":"315-324"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10835215","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143521351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tong Yang;Yuexuan Xu;Yongchun Fang;David Navarro-Alarcon;Song Men;Ning Sun
{"title":"Accelerated Gradient-Based Neuroadaptive Synchronization Control for Antagonistic PAM Robot Hands With Obstacle Avoidance and Motion Constraints","authors":"Tong Yang;Yuexuan Xu;Yongchun Fang;David Navarro-Alarcon;Song Men;Ning Sun","doi":"10.1109/TMRB.2025.3527695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TMRB.2025.3527695","url":null,"abstract":"Multiple pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) connected through antagonistic joints are more in line with the motion characteristics of human muscles, which better imitate/replace humans to complete a series of actual tasks, such as transportation and assembly. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive solutions to handle hysteresis, creep, input delay, and other inherent characteristics of PAMs, as well as synchronous control and obstacle avoidance that are important to multiple muscles working together. To this end, this paper proposes a new neuroadaptive synchronization controller for 3-D antagonistic PAM-actuated robot hands, which also elaborately designs auxiliary terms to realize obstacle avoidance in Cartesian space and motion constraints in joint space together. Here, dynamic obstacles are regarded as external independent objects, whose nonlinear dynamics are introduced into the proposed controller to restrict end-effectors. Meanwhile, the constraint terms of joint angles and angle velocities are designed as time-varying proportional-differential gains, instead of common barrier functions that may induce overlarge inputs. Particularly, this paper proposes an accelerated gradient-based learning term to relax the linear parameterization condition of uncertain/unmodeled dynamics and obtain accurate weight estimates, based on which, it is proven that both tracking errors and synchronous errors rapidly converge to zero. In addition to complete theoretical analysis, some hardware experiments also verify the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed controller.","PeriodicalId":73318,"journal":{"name":"IEEE transactions on medical robotics and bionics","volume":"7 1","pages":"377-391"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143521461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}