Electrical and Electronics Engineering MS Thesis Defense by Hazan Ezgi İmer

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KOÇ UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SCIENCES & ENGINEERING

ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING

MS THESIS DEFENSE BY HAZAN EZGİ İMER

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Title: A Wearable Sensory System Design for Spine Monitoring

Speaker: HAZAN EZGİ İMER

Time: September 13, 2017, 10:00

Place: ENG 208

Koç University

Rumeli Feneri Yolu

Sariyer, Istanbul

Thesis Committee Members:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Engin Erzin (Advisor, Koç University )

Assoc. Prof. Özden Özyemişçi Taşkıran, M.D. (Koç University)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Burak Acar (Boğaziçi University)

Abstract:

The body posture and spine structure play important roles in human health. Besides the

unintentional injuries and accidents, wrong sejant postures, slouching and a static life style, in

the course of time, may damage the functions of the spine. Therefore, the physical tracking of

the spine structure, and determination and diagnosis of any existing complications are of

capital importance for a healthy life. The aim of this thesis is to monitor the movement of the

spine via real time visualization while capturing the angle values of the spine using flex

sensors. For this purpose, hardware and software systems are developed. While the circuit,

composed of a micro controller and flex sensors, is designed in the hardware system, the

software system includes algorithms, written in Java programming language, for data

acquisition, processing and visualization in real time. Various medical vest designs and sensor

mounting solutions, such as medical tapes, are investigated for the wearable sensory system.

Additionally, a dataset of sensory measurements from eight different spine exercise poses are

collected, and a support vector machine classifier is utilized for identification of the spine

exercise poses with high accuracy.