जर्नल ऑफ बायोमेडिकल सिस्टम्स एंड इमर्जिंग टेक्नोलॉजीज

The plasma actuator is a relatively new technology intended to replace mechanical actuators on aircraft or reduce drag. A small size dielectric barrier discharge microplasma actuator energized at low discharge voltage of 1.4 kV was applied for flow modification. Flow was measured using incense particles which were tracked by a highspeed camera. An AC voltage was applied to the multi-electrode microplasma actuator. The multi-electrode system allowed different electrodes to be driven independently, thus, due to the microplasma generation, leftward flow and upward flow were obtained by changing the configuration of the multi-electrode system. The high-speed camera measurements and particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) analysis showed the modification of the flow by microplasma at various time intervals. The experimental results were compared with the numerical simulations results obtained using our developed code considering the Suzen & Huang model. The numerical results were in agreement with the experimental results.

Parts of a hydrocephalus mechatronic shunting system will be implanted beneath the skin of a patient and frequent physical access to the devices for alteration of the intensity, duration or other characteristics of the therapy is not desirable. From this point, there is an essential need to find out a method to access, update and reprogram the implanted microcontroller wirelessly without a need to physical access to such microcontroller.

In this paper, a system and method has been proposed and developed for wirelessly managing the mechatronic shunting system. This method has three main contributions. First, remotely reprogram the implanted mechatronic shunt by replacing the values of vital implantable parameters such as valve schedules, intracranial pressure threshold values and pressure sensor settings.

Second, the usefulness of this approach was demonstrated using a real time sleeping schedule for the microcontroller to reduce the power needed.

Third, a problem associated with memory size limitations has been addressed by using embedded software to derive the required values and parameters in real time in case there is a need for such parameters without saving these values.

As a result, several wireless data transmission tasks of this method are implemented. The framework of the system is described and the functions of the main system are illustrated. The management shunting method was implemented and tested to demonstrate practicality, reliability and flexibility.