Robot for Advanced Long Bone Fracture Reduction (R.ALFRED)

Faculty Development Competitive Research Grant Program 2021-2023

The project will lead to an intrinsically compliant 6-degree of freedom parallel robot to facilitate the long bone fracture reduction procedure to address the challenges in the existing traction table based manual reduction process. The researchers in Kazakhstan have already developed an early prototype of such a robot. This robot, however, requires a biomechanical model of the fractured femur for optimization of the reduction path, number of sensors, particularly optical sensors to provide feedback to the control system before it can be used in real-world clinical scenarios. This project will involve the orthopedic knowledge, sensory expertise and the bio-robotics expertise of the PI and CoPIs to produce an intelligent robotic long bone fracture reduction system. We will also undertake robot design optimization to further improve the performance parameters of the robot.