The the device utilizes an Adafruit BLE Arudino and Accel/Gyro/Magno 9DOF IMU powered the 3.9V LiPo battery. It is encapsulated in an insulating outer casing that will be attached to the medical scaffolds highlighted with green circles on the second picture.
In addition to the device, surgical pedicle screws were drilled into professional spinal model that mimics the density and the flexibility of a human spine. This spinal model serves to record data and reference physiological structures at the early beta stages of prototype.
The gyroscopic and acceleration data gathered from the sensor is sent to an off-hand computer to be processed into both linear and angular displacements. This is done through the use of a Kalman filter which can update itself as time advances, allowing it to track the entire duration of the surgery. The values here are plotted and then sent to a custom GUI made in python.
The GUI includes some useful features for the surgeons such as a stopwatch type timer where they can start and stop the tracking to reinitialize a starting point. It also displays a 3D movable graph of the tracked motion which the surgeon can also rotate to change their field of vision.
Credit: Qiming (Regan) Zhang