News in Press-centre

The winners of the first Neurostart Bioengineering Hackathon were announced in Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU). As a result of a five-day non-stop marathon, students presented prototypes of eleven prostheses, software applications, sensors, and other technological innovations for modern medicine.

According to experts, the best development was a foot and lower leg bionic prosthesis. Students of the FEFU School of Engineering and School of Natural Sciences have been working on creating an active foot for prosthesis for more than a year. The device should be controlled by a remaining muscle and be more flexible than existing analogues.

“At the hackathon, we have assembled a foot that can move in response to a signal. We have developed proprietary software for using telemetry sensors, located at the foot of a healthy person. Basing on the data obtained, we have trained a model of the neural network and it can predict the correct movement of the foot. This will help to achieve a more natural motion of the foot prosthesis in the future,” said Daniel Serbinovich, the project leader, a student of the FEFU School of Natural Sciences.

The second place was won by the project of a neural interface for prosthesis tactile sensing. Polina Bezrukavaya, a student at the FEFU School of Biomedicine and her colleagues from the School of Engineering offers a new technology that will restore the lost motor function of the hand and, most importantly, bring back the sensitivity. For this purpose, it is proposed to implant electrodes into the nerve for stimulation.

The third place was taken by the developers of the software application for rehabilitation of shoulder injuries in virtual reality (VR) — students of the FEFU School of Engineering and School of Natural Sciences. The participants have developed tests to assess the severity of trauma sustained and to find a suitable course of recovery.