Abbate Sbaffoni, L. R. (2019). Development of a feature for the specification of a temporally variable massage force and integration into an existing system [Diploma Thesis, Technische Universität Wien]. reposiTUm. https://doi.org/10.34726/hss.2019.47000
This masters thesis continues the development of a prototype for a therapeutic automatic massage bed to be used in hospitals for the regular treatment of bedridden patients. The automatic functions and programming capabilities of this device would allow to free up time of valuable therapists dedicated to routine treatments and allow for preemptive massage care in real world situations where medical personnel is just too overworked to perform it properly. With the main core of the prototype being already developed (including user interface on the PC, preprocessing, fieldbus system, axes controllers, sensorics and all their encompassing programming) the work performed for this thesis focused on improving the functionality of the vertical axis of the machine that applies the massage force to the patient, expanding its functionality to be able to perform massages with custom force profiles. A new interface was programmed in LabVIEW that allows to draw new massage paths by hand using a pressure sensitive tablet by Wacom. This program stores the pressure values as the desired force values. The main program that runs in the PC and directs all the peripheral axis controllers was then modified to accept this new information and transmit it over to the controller of the vertical axis using the existing fieldbus infrastructure. On the controller side, a feasibility analysis was performed to assess if the available processing power and memory of the existing microprocessor was adequate to the task. It was concluded that the microprocessor can still be adapted to perform this new function. The existing PID cascade controller was adapted and improved based on the concept of a switching position/force controller to follow a force setpoint. Additionally, many improvements were made on the handling of the measured process variable, the force, including a better zeroing logic and the addition of a programmatic nonlinear median filter to adapt to the existing design of the massage tool.
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