SUBHASH MISHRA
Dhanbad, May 19: IIT Indian School of Mines (ISM) Dhanbad mechanical engineering department has developed a device to control the pneumatic medical beds through Electroencephalography (EEG) signals generated by the brain of bedridden patients.
Dr Zafar Alam, assistant professor of the mechanical engineering department who led the team of researchers, said the move is aimed to help paralytic/severely affected patients to control the position of their pneumatic medical beds by the brain through electroencephalography (EEG) device.
The research team comprising B Tech final year students, Manmohan Labh, Yalla Mark Vishal, Inampudi Sai Amit and research scholar Ashish Siddharth completed the project between August 2021 and May 2022.
The team has also filed a patent application claiming that the system developed by them will ensure efficient medical governance by reducing the nursing loads for patients at health centres/hospitals.
“The thought behind the project is to enable the paralytic, bedridden person to control or move and fix their medical beds without the requirement of any physical effort,” said Prof Alam.
Elaborating on the technicalities, Prof Alam said the brain sends the signal in the human body in the form of small impulses of currents and spikes, which are also known as Electroencephalography signals through the network of neurons and nervous systems.
“A study of these signals has been carried out to analyse a person’s thoughts and then with the aid of machine learning, a trained model was obtained to recognize whether the patient wants to lift the bed up or down,” elaborated Prof Alam.
Shedding light on the importance of this device, Prof Alam said that severely affected patients who can’t move on their own and require continuous nursing of their condition would get help from this project.
“The developed model controls a pneumatic actuated medical bed to the desired position,” said Prof Alam and added that these pneumatic actuators use air as a fluid medium which creates an additional advantage to the system.
