Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Master of Engineering Science

Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Supervisor

Dr. Rajni V. Patel

Abstract

In microsurgery, the human hand imposes certain limitations in accurately positioning the tip of a device such as scalpel. Any errors in the motion of the hand make microsurgical procedures difficult and involuntary motions such as hand tremors can make some procedures significantly difficult to perform. This is particularly true in the case of vitreoretinal microsurgery. The most familiar source of involuntary motion is physiological tremor. Real-time compensation of tremor is, therefore, necessary to assist surgeons to precisely position and manipulate the tool-tip to accurately perform a microsurgery. In this thesis, a novel handheld device (AID) is described for compensation of physiological tremor in the hand. MEMS-based accelerometers and gyroscopes have been used for sensing the motion of the hand in six degrees of freedom (DOF). An augmented state complementary Kalman filter is used to calculate 2 DOF orientation. An adaptive filtering algorithm, band-limited Multiple Fourier linear combiner (BMFLC), is used to calculate the tremor component in the hand in real-time. Ionic Polymer Metallic Composites (IPMCs) have been used as actuators for deflecting the tool-tip to compensate for the tremor.

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