Current Status of Project:
This week, we met with Dr. Thoroughman and his lab to see if his extra force transducer could fit our needs. It seemed that the force transducer he had was a handle that was better suited for measuring hand control in the x-y plane and not for measuring compressive force. We then met with Patricia Widder and she showed us some luggage scales that could be useful, except that they didn’t connect to any output, which wouldn’t allow us to track the force in real time. We also looked online and force transducer that looked like this: http://www.phidgets.com/products.php?product_id=3102. This is somewhat affordable for us and could be useful in measuring force real-time. We are not sure if we will be able to have an output that feeds directly into our phone, but that is an issue that can be dealt with later. Just having real-time force data, even if it connected to our computer for now, would suffice. We also looked into what smartphone app development is like. For Android applications, there are a few computer applications that aid in smartphone design, such as MIT’s App Inventor 2.
Work Planned for Next Week:
We plan on exploring all of the options in our Pugh chart more thoroughly and adding the Modified Ashworth Scale to our Pugh Chart (the current gold standard). In the future, we may need to buy velcro and a phone case to see if we can use the force transducer.
Anything needed from Client or TA before work can progress:
Does the Paraquad have a flexible band (i.e. for physical therapy use?) that we can use to wrap around the ankle to serve as the support for the force transducer?
This week, we met with Dr. Thoroughman and his lab to see if his extra force transducer could fit our needs. It seemed that the force transducer he had was a handle that was better suited for measuring hand control in the x-y plane and not for measuring compressive force. We then met with Patricia Widder and she showed us some luggage scales that could be useful, except that they didn’t connect to any output, which wouldn’t allow us to track the force in real time. We also looked online and force transducer that looked like this: http://www.phidgets.com/products.php?product_id=3102. This is somewhat affordable for us and could be useful in measuring force real-time. We are not sure if we will be able to have an output that feeds directly into our phone, but that is an issue that can be dealt with later. Just having real-time force data, even if it connected to our computer for now, would suffice. We also looked into what smartphone app development is like. For Android applications, there are a few computer applications that aid in smartphone design, such as MIT’s App Inventor 2.
Work Planned for Next Week:
We plan on exploring all of the options in our Pugh chart more thoroughly and adding the Modified Ashworth Scale to our Pugh Chart (the current gold standard). In the future, we may need to buy velcro and a phone case to see if we can use the force transducer.
Anything needed from Client or TA before work can progress:
Does the Paraquad have a flexible band (i.e. for physical therapy use?) that we can use to wrap around the ankle to serve as the support for the force transducer?