Projects

Hardware Design and Development

My lab is involved  in number projects to design/develop low-cost, portable, and easy-to-use wearable solutions for patients’ rehabilitation and monitoring. Brief description of these projects is given below:

      [expander_maker id=”1″ more=”Read more” less=”Read less”]

    1. Assistive device to assist the drop foot patients in walking/rehabilitation without the need of experts.[Video]
    2. Brain-controlled (EEG-controlled) wheelchair to assist the movement of the patients who are paralysed below the neck.[Video]
    3. Muscle-controlled (EMG-controlled) prosthetic arm to assist amputees in daily life routine tasks.[Video]
    4. Muscle-controlled (EMG-controlled) alert generator to generate alerts in time of danger or emergency.[Video]
    5. Li-Fi-based patients’ monitoring to utilize light resources efficiently for monitoring vital signs of the patients.[Video]
    • Drop Foot Assistive Device: We have developed a prototype of the device that would assist the drop foot patients inadjusting the FES stimulus themselves. This would provide them with the opportunity to walk freely and confidently at home without the aid of any expert. Furthermore, the device would assist them in walking on uneven terrains and stairs, too. We tested the device on one drop foot patient from Fauji Foundation Hospital.
    • Brain-controlled Wheelchair: In this project we are developing a system in which paralyzed people would be able to control the wheelchair with the blinks of their eyes only. We started with a manual wheelchair and have converted it to electronically-controlled wheelchair. In the next step, we successfully controlled its movement with joystick for the people who have paralysis/restricted-movement in the lower body so they can move the wheelchair by controlling the joystick with their hand. In the next step, we will control the movement of the wheelchair with eye blinks using single-channel EEG device.
    • Muscle-controlled Prosthetic Arm: In this project, we have successfully controlled 3D printed single-finger basic movements (open and close) with the help of muscles’ signals in real time. In the next step, we will control the whole hand’s basic movements using these signals. Afterwards, we plan to develop and install the whole system in the amputees at Fauji Foundation Hospital.
    • Muscle-controlled Trigger Generator: In this project, we are developing a low-cost muscle-controlled alert generator. The purpose of this device is to generate alert signals when the fist is closed (in case of any emergency) and transfer it to someone via cell phone of the user so that the contact person can take necessary action to assist the user.
    • Visual-ligh-based Patients’ Monitoring: In this project, we have successfully developed a patient monitoring system that monitors the vital signs (temperature, heartbeat) of the patients via sensors and transfer the data to the terminal screen using visual-light-communication. The main purpose of the project is to develop a patients’ monitoring system that is low-cost and is free of clutter of wires. Furthermore, such a system would remove the issue of signal interference (that may happen with using wifi) for certain types of patients such as the patients using pacemaker.

[/expander_maker]

Integrated Framework for Detection, Survival Prediction, and Modeling of Brain Tumor 

Brain tumors are one of the major forms of tumors and researchers are focsuing on automating the process of their classification, segmentation, and survival predcition. However, currently there is no platform available, which can assist the clinicians in all of these aspects. The aim of this project is to develop an efficient framework to integrate all of these aspects to assist in prevention and cure of brain tumors.

Naturalistic Stimuli for Memory Networks

Naturalistic stimuli such as listening to music and stories activate brain regions in a more natural manner compared to standard task-based paradagim. We are using open-access naturalistic stimuli datasets to explore how the functional connectivity in the memory specific regions of the brain changes with time. We plan to explore these changes on various time (and space) scales and find the similarities/differences on the level of individual subjects. The main objective of the study is to find individualized similaries/differences between network changes in response to naturalistic stimuli and better understand the brain functions during neurological disorders such as Alzeihmer’s Desease.

Alzeihmer’s Desease Progression 

We are working to explore the progression of Alzeihmer’s disease during its different stages starting from MCI. Our focus is on structural and functional changes taking palce at individual level by extracting the connectivity maps. We are using ADNI lognitudinal dataset for this project.

Brain and Behavior

Our brain functionality changes with our behavior under different tasks/conditions. For example, music influences our moods but the influence of same music on different people may be different. Study of the relationship between brain and behavior is challenging but the results may be useful in understanding the role of behavior changes to improve brain functionality. We are investigating the relationship between the underlying structures in EEG and behavior data using topological data analysis and manifold estimation.

Stress Influence on Students

The stress levels due to social and economic conditions are on the rise all over the world and the situation is worse in developing/under-developed countries due to lack of awareness. There is a need to understand the causes and effects of stress on people from different domains of the society. This comprehension will assist in finding the ways to reduce the stress levels for mentally healthy societies. 

{
Research is to see what everyone else has seen, and think what nobody has thought.

– Albert Szent-Györgyi