Biomedizinische Technik. Biomedical engineering
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Clinical Trial
Design and implementation of a control system reflecting the level of analgesia during general anesthesia.
Measuring and ensuring an adequate level of analgesia in patients are of increasing interest in the area of automated drug delivery during general anesthesia. Therefore, the aim of this investigation was to develop a control system that may reflect the intraoperative analgesia value. Our hypothesis was that a feedback controller could be applied in clinical practice safely and at an adequate quality of analgesia. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the practical feasibility of such a system in a clinical setting. ⋯ The control system, reflecting the level of analgesia during general anesthesia designed and evaluated in this study, allows for a clinically practical, nearly fully automated infusion of an opioid during medium-length surgical procedures with acceptable technical requirements and an adequate precision.
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The deformability of human fingers is central to addressing the real-life hazard of finger jamming between the window and seal entry of a power-operated motor vehicle side door window. The index and little fingers of the left hand of 109 participants and of 20 cadaver specimens were placed in a measurement setup. Participants progressively jammed their fingers at five different dorsal-palmar jam positions up to the maximum tolerable pain threshold, whereas the cadaver specimens were jammed up to the maximum possible deflection. ⋯ In the cadaver fingers, the average of the maximum force applied was 1886 N for the index finger and 1833 N for the little finger. In 200 jam positions, 25 fractures were observed on radiographs; fractures occurred at an average force of 1485 N. These data assisted the development of a prototype of a bionic test device for more realistic validation of power-operated motor vehicle windows.
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The aim of this study was to systematically register data for respiratory and heart rates (RR and HR, respectively) during different sleep stages [active (AS, i.e., rapid eye movement) and quiet (QS, i.e., non-rapid eye movement) sleep] and age in a large number of healthy infants (277) during the first year of life to simplify polysomnography. The reference values in this age group differ significantly between the number of patients and age at time of investigation. According to strict inclusion and exclusion criteria, the measurement of polysomnography included HR (beats per minute, or bpm), RR (breaths per minute, or breaths/min), brain waves, SO2, sound, and video. ⋯ The mean HR and RR significantly decreased with age in both sleep stages (p<0.05). The mean HR is significantly lower during QS compared with AS (p<0.05). Our data may serve as basic values for HR and RR in different sleep stages during the first year of life.