Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Human-Human Sensorimotor Interaction(2019) Honarvar, Sara; Shim, Dr. Jae Kun; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)We investigated the role of sensory feedback in inter-personal interactions when two co-workers are working together. Twenty-five co-workers completed two isometric finger force production experiments. In Experiment 1, co-workers isometrically produced finger forces such that combined force will match a target force and/or torque under different visual and haptic conditions. In Experiment 2, without participants’ knowledge, each performed the same task with the playback of his/her partner’s force trajectory previously recorded from Experiment 1. Results from both experiments indicated that co-workers performed the task worse in the presence of haptic and visual feedback. Since, in latter as opposed to the former condition, they adopted a compensatory strategy to accomplish the task accurately. Further analysis showed that co-workers achieved the same level of motor performance with similar control strategies, suggesting that they did not work synergistically to achieve better performance, but one co-worker processed another as disturbance when they worked together.Item Mechanical Manipulation and Characterization of Biological Cells(2008-10-07) Pillarisetti, Anand; Desai, Jaydev P; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mechanical manipulation and characterization of an individual biological cell is currently one of the most exciting research areas in the field of medical robotics. Single cell manipulation is an important process in intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), pro-nuclei DNA injection, gene therapy, and other biomedical areas. However, conventional cell manipulation requires long training and the success rate depends on the experience of the operator. The goal of this research is to address the drawbacks of conventional cell manipulation by using force and vision feedback for cell manipulation tasks. We hypothesize that force feedback plays an important role in cell manipulation and possibly helps in cell characterization. This dissertation will summarize our research on: 1) the development of force and vision feedback interface for cell manipulation, 2) human subject studies to evaluate the addition of force feedback for cell injection tasks, 3) the development of haptics-enabled atomic force microscope system for cell indentation tasks, 4) appropriate analytical model for characterizing the mechanical property of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESC) and 5) several indentation studies on mESC to determine the mechanical property of undifferentiated and early differentiating (6 days under differentiation conditions) mESC. Our experimental results on zebrafish egg cells show that a system with force feedback capability when combined with vision feedback can lead to potentially higher success rates in cell injection tasks. Using this information, we performed experiments on mESC using the AFM to understand their characteristics in the undifferentiated pluripotent state as well as early differentiating state. These experiments were done on both live as well as fixed cells to understand the correlation between the two during cell indentation studies. Our results show that the mechanical property of undifferentiated mESC differs from early differentiating (6th day) mESC in both live and fixed cells. Thus, we hypothesize that mechanical characterization studies will potentially pave the way for developing a high throughput system with force feedback capability, to understand and predict the differentiation path a particular pluripotent cell will follow. This finding could also be used to develop improved methods of targeted cellular differentiation of stem cells for therapeutic and regenerative medicine.