Safe Supervisory Control of Soft Robot Actuators.

Although soft robots show safer interactions with their environment than traditional robots, soft mechanisms and actuators still have significant potential for damage or degradation particularly during unmodeled contact. This article introduces a feedback strategy for safe soft actuator operation during control of a soft robot. To do so, a supervisory controller monitors actuator state and dynamically saturates control inputs to avoid conditions that could lead to physical damage.

Sensing and Dynamics Predictions for Electrothermally-Actuated Soft Robot Limbs.

Untethered soft robots that locomote using electrothermally-responsive materials like shape memory alloy (SMA) face challenging design constraints for sensing actuator states. At the same time, modeling of actuator behaviors faces steep challenges, even with available sensor data, due to complex electrical-thermal-mechanical interactions and hysteresis. This article proposes a framework for sensing and dynamics modeling of actuator states, particularly temperature of SMA wires, which is used to predict robot motions.

Liquid Crystal Elastomer with Integrated Soft Thermoelectrics for Shape Memory Actuation and Energy Harvesting.

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) have attracted tremendous interest as actuators for soft robotics due to their mechanical and shape memory properties. However, LCE actuators typically respond to thermal stimulation through active Joule heating and passive cooling, which make them difficult to control. In this work, LCEs are combined with soft, stretchable thermoelectrics to create transducers capable of electrically controlled actuation, active cooling, and thermal-to-electrical energy conversion.

The critical care data exchange format: a proposed flexible data standard for combining clinical and high-frequency physiologic data in critical care.

To develop a standardized format for exchanging clinical and physiologic data generated in the intensive care unit. Our goal was to develop a format that would accommodate the data collection pipelines of various sites but would not require dataset-specific schemas or ad-hoc tools for decoding and analysis.A number of centers had independently developed solutions for storing clinical and physiologic data using Hierarchical Data Format-Version 5 (HDF5), a well-supported standard already in use in multiple other fields.

Parsimony of Hemodynamic Monitoring Data Sufficient for the Detection of Hemorrhage.

Background: Individualized hemodynamic monitoring approaches are not well validated. Thus, we evaluated the discriminative performance improvement that might occur when moving from noninvasive monitoring (NIM) to invasive monitoring and with increasing levels of featurization associated with increasing sampling frequency and referencing to a stable baseline to identify bleeding during surgery in a porcine model.

Methods: We collected physiologic waveform (WF) data (250 Hz) from NIM, central venous (CVC), arterial (ART), and pulmonary arterial (PAC) catheters, plus mixed venous O2 saturation and cardiac output from 38 anesthetized Yorkshire pigs bled at 20 mL/min until a mean arterial pressure of 30 mm Hg following a 30-minute baseline period.

Increasing Cardiovascular Data Sampling Frequency and Referencing It to Baseline Improve Hemorrhage Detection.

Unlabelled: We hypothesize that knowledge of a stable personalized baseline state and increased data sampling frequency would markedly improve the ability to detect progressive hypovolemia during hemorrhage earlier and with a lower false positive rate than when using less granular data.

Design: Prospective temporal challenge.

Setting: Large animal research laboratory, University Medical Center.

A call to alarms: Current state and future directions in the battle against alarm fatigue.

Research demonstrates that the majority of alarms derived from continuous bedside monitoring devices are non-actionable. This avalanche of unreliable alerts causes clinicians to experience sensory overload when attempting to sort real from false alarms, causing desensitization and alarm fatigue, which in turn leads to adverse events when true instability is neither recognized nor attended to despite the alarm. The scope of the problem of alarm fatigue is broad, and its contributing mechanisms are numerous.

Genome Sequence of Gordonia Phage BetterKatz.

BetterKatz is a bacteriophage isolated from a soil sample collected in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania using the host Gordonia terrae 3612. BetterKatz's genome is 50,636 bp long and contains 75 predicted protein-coding genes, 35 of which have been assigned putative functions. BetterKatz is not closely related to other sequenced Gordonia phages.