Towards a Novel Wearable Robotic Vest for Hemorrhage Suppression

This paper introduces a novel robotic system designed to manage severe bleeding in emergency scenarios, including unique environments like space stations. The robot features a shape-adjustable "ring mechanism", transitioning from a circular to an elliptical configuration to adjust wound coverage across various anatomical regions. We developed various arms for this ring mechanism with varying flexibilities to improve adaptability when applied to non-extremities of the body (abdomen, back, neck, etc.). To apply equal and constant pressure across the wound, we developed an inflatable ring and airbag balloon that are compatible with this shape-changing ring mechanism. A series of experiments focused on evaluating various ring arm configurations to characterize their bending stiffness. Subsequent experiments measured the force exerted by the airbag balloon system using a digital scale. Despite its promising performance, certain limitations related to coverage area are identified. The shape-changing effect of the device is limited to scenarios involving partially inflated or deflated airbag balloons, and cannot fully conform to complex anatomical regions. Finally, the device was tested on casualty simulation kits, where it successfully demonstrated its ability to control simulated bleeding.

ExoNav II: Design of a Robotic Tool with Follow-the-Leader Motion Capability for Lateral and Ventral Spinal Cord Stimulation (SCS)

Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) electrodes are traditionally placed in the dorsal epidural space to stimulate the dorsal column fibers for pain therapy. Recently, SCS has gained attention in restoring gait. However, the motor fibers triggering locomotion are located in the ventral and lateral spinal cord. Currently, SCS electrodes are steered manually, making it difficult to navigate them to the lateral and ventral motor fibers in the spinal cord. In this work, we propose a helically micro-machined continuum robot that can bend in a helical shape when subjected to actuation tendon forces. Using a stiff outer tube and adding translational and rotational degrees of freedom, this helical continuum robot can perform follow-the-leader (FTL) motion. We propose a kinematic model to relate tendon stroke and geometric parameters of the robot's helical shape to its acquired trajectory and end-effector position. We evaluate the proposed kinematic model and the robot's FTL motion capability experimentally. The stroke-based method, which links tendon stroke values to the robot's shape, showed inaccuracies with a 19.84 mm deviation and an RMSE of 14.42 mm for 63.6 mm of robot's length bending. The position-based method, using kinematic equations to map joint space to task space, performed better with a 10.54 mm deviation and an RMSE of 8.04 mm. Follow-the-leader experiments showed deviations of 11.24 mm and 7.32 mm, with RMSE values of 8.67 mm and 5.18 mm for the stroke-based and position-based methods, respectively. Furthermore, end-effector trajectories in two FTL motion trials are compared to confirm the robot's repeatable behavior. Finally, we demonstrate the robot's operation on a 3D-printed spinal cord phantom model.