James Geoffrey Chase

University of Canterbury | UC · Department of Mechanical Engineering

This article introduces a simple, efficient spectral-based approach for rapid preliminary seismic assessment of earthquake-affected structures. Performance is validated using data from three highly earthquake-affected structures in New Zealand, where visual inspection with subjective outcomes missed damage, resulting in inaccurate and delayed decis...

Digital health apps have become a staple in daily life, promoting awareness and providing motivation for a healthier lifestyle. With an already overwhelmed healthcare system, digital therapies offer relief to both patient and physician alike. One such planned digital therapy application is the incorporation of an emotion recognition model as a tool...

Respiratory data was collected from 20 subjects, with an even sex distribution, in the low-risk clinical unit at the University of Canterbury. Ethical consent for this trial was granted by the University of Canterbury Human Research Ethics Committee (Ref: HREC 2023/30/LR-PS). Respiratory data were collected, for each subject, over three tests consi...

Diabetes Technology Society hosted its annual Diabetes Technology Meeting from November 1 to November 4, 2023. Meeting topics included digital health; metrics of glycemia; the integration of glucose and insulin data into the electronic health record; technologies for insulin pumps, blood glucose monitors, and continuous glucose monitors; diabetes d...

Background Physiological modelling often involves models described by large numbers of variables and significant volumes of clinical data. Mathematical interpretation of such models frequently necessitates analysing data points in high-dimensional spaces. Existing algorithms for analysing high-dimensional points either lose important dimensionality...

Respiratory disease is a major contributor to healthcare costs, as well as increasing morbidity and early mortality. The device presented is used to simulate the effects of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in healthy people. The intended use is to provide data equivalent to COPD data measured from those who are ill for initial validatio...

(1) Background: Technically, a simple, inexpensive, and non-invasive method of ascertaining volume changes in thoracic and abdominal cavities are required to expedite the development and validation of pulmonary mechanics models. Clinically, this measure enables the real-time monitoring of muscular recruitment patterns and breathing effort. Thus, it...

Resting breathing data was collected from 80 smokers, vapers, asthmatics, and otherwise healthy people in the low-risk clinical unit at the University of Canterbury. Subjects were asked to breathe normally through a full-face mask connected to a Fisher and Paykel Healthcare SleepStyle SPSCAA CPAP device. PEEP (Positive End-Expiratory Pressure) supp...

The breathing dataset presented is collected from 20 healthy individuals at the University of Canterbury using a device to simulate the pressure and flow profiles of obstructive pulmonary disease. Specifically, the expiratory non-linear resistance, which generates the characteristic expiratory pressure-flow loop lobe seen in obstructive disease. Et...

Respiratory dysfunction and failure are common in the intensive care unit (ICU); they are often the primary reasons for ICU admission and affect length of stay, mortality, and cost. However, diagnosing respiratory dysfunction requires arterial blood gas values to calculate the partial pressure of arterial oxygen (PaO2) to a fraction of inspired oxy...

There is an increasingly urgent need for humans to interactively control robotic systems to perform increasingly precise remote operations, concomitant with the rapid development of space exploration, deep-sea discovery, nuclear rehabilitation and management, and robotic-assisted medical devices. The potential high value of medical telerobotic appl...

Respiratory model-based methods require datasets containing enough dynamics to ensure model identifiability for development and validation. Rapid expiratory occlusion has been used to identify elastance and resistance within a single breath. Currently accepted practice for rapid expiratory occlusion involves a 100 ms occlusion of the expiratory pat...

Background Patient–ventilator asynchrony is common during mechanical ventilation (MV) in intensive care unit (ICU), leading to worse MV care outcome. Identification of asynchrony is critical for optimizing MV settings to reduce or eliminate asynchrony, whilst current clinical visual inspection of all typical types of asynchronous breaths is difficu...

Emotional intelligence strives to bridge the gap between human and machine interactions. The application of such systems varies and is becoming more prominent as healthcare services seek to provide more efficient care by utilizing smart digital health apps. One application in digital health is the incorporation of emotion recognition systems as a t...

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) has shown promising results as a low-cost imaging method for visualizing ventilation distribution within the lungs. However, clinical interpretation of EIT images is often hindered by blurred anatomical alignment and reconstruction artifacts. Integrating structural priors into the EIT reconstruction process has...

Neural networks are increasingly able to outperform traditional machine learning and filtering approaches in classification tasks. However, with the rise in their popularity, many unknowns still exist when it comes to the internal learning processes of the networks in terms of how they make the right decisions for prediction. As a result, in this w...

A low-cost ($120 NZD, $75 USD), low-power (1-year battery life), portable, and programmable syringe pump design is presented, which offers an alternative to high-cost commercial devices with limited battery life. Contrary to typical motor-driven syringe pumps, the design utilizes a compression spring coupled with a clockwork escapement mechanism to...

There is a paucity of data on the progression of track cycling sprinters, and the evolution of training and performance over a training cycle. Following prior research showing relationships between sprint cycling power and endurance cycling power, we compared these relations over a 3-month period. Our hypothesis is large improvements in power would...

Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) ventilation is a commonly prescribed respiratory therapy providing positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) to assist breathing and prevent airway collapse. Setting PEEP is highly debated and it is thus primarily titrated based on symptoms of excessive or insufficient support. However, titration periods are...

Objectives Currently, there are no data on sex differences in the power profiles in sprint track cycling. This cross-section study analyses retrospective data of female and male track sprint cyclists for sex differences. We hypothesized that women would exhibit lower peak power to weight than men, as well as demonstrate a different distribution of...

ARDS is a heterogenous syndrome with a high mortality rate and limited therapeutic strategies. PEEP is routinely applied to these patients as a part of a protective lung ventilation strategy because getting it right helps optimize respiratory system compliance and improve oxygenation. However, if the PEEP is too low or too high, it may cause harm....

Background and objective: Healthcare datasets are plagued by issues of data scarcity and class imbalance. Clinically validated virtual patient (VP) models can provide accurate in-silico representations of real patients and thus a means for synthetic data generation in hospital critical care settings. This research presents a realistic, time-varyin...

Technological advancements are vital for improving the capacity of the health system to deliver health and well-being benefits to individuals. Despite significant financial investments in technological innovations in healthcare, patients reported benefiting from only 30%–60% of new healthcare technologies. We argue that failed adoption can be attri...

Model-based glycemic control (GC) protocols are used to treat stress-induced hyperglycaemia in intensive care units (ICUs). The STAR (Stochastic-TARgeted) glycemic control protocol - used in clinical practice in several ICUs in New Zealand, Hungary, Belgium, and Malaysia - is a model-based GC protocol using a patient-specific, model-based insulin s...

Current convention place peak power as the main determinant of sprint cycling performance. This study challenges that notion and compares two common durations of sprint cycling performance with not only peak power, but power out to 20-min. There is also a belief where maximal efforts of longer durations will be detrimental to sprint cycling perform...

Luminance maps are information-dense measurements that can be used to directly evaluate and derive a number of important lighting measures, and improve lighting design and practices. However, cost barriers have limited the uptake of luminance imaging devices. This study presents a low-cost custom luminance imaging device developed from a Raspberry...

This paper introduces a novel digital twin modelling framework combining accurate structural health monitoring (SHM) results delivered by hysteresis loop analysis (HLA) with the basis function modelling to predict structural damage and responses of earthquake-affected structures under future seismic events. The measured data sets of a 12-storey 1/1...

Background and objective: The identification of insulinaemic pharmacokinetic parameters using the least-squares criterion approach is easily influenced by outlying data due to its sensitivity. Furthermore, the least-squares criterion has a tendency to overfit and produce incorrect results. Hence, this research proposes an alternative approach usin...

Latency mitigation is crucial to increasing operational success, ease of use, and product quality in telemanipulation tasks when remotely guiding complex robotic systems. Hardware limitations have created a gap in performance optimization due to large teleoperation delays, which machine learning techniques could fill with lower time, improved perfo...

This paper presents a novel, mechanics-based framework to create digital twins for earthquake-affected pinched structures, like reinforced concrete framed buildings. It uses robust and accurate structural health monitoring (SHM) results delivered by the hysteresis loop analysis method as an input to create digital twin models to predict nonlinear d...

Imaging photometers and ray-tracing software packages have made it possible to capture and model high-resolution and accurate luminance maps. However, luminance map measurement is rarely seen in professional practice, despite its ability to evaluate visual parameters accurately and directly, such as contrast, visual, size, and target brightness. Tw...

Hyperglycaemia is a common problem in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Achieving good control can result in better outcomes for patients. However, good control is difficult, where poor control and resulting hypoglycaemia reduces outcomes and confounds results. Clinically validated models can provide good control, and subcutaneous insulin deli...

Diabetes Technology Society hosted its annual Diabetes Technology Meeting from November 3 to November 5, 2022. Meeting topics included (1) the measurement of glucose, insulin, and ketones; (2) virtual diabetes care; (3) metrics for managing diabetes and predicting outcomes; (4) integration of continuous glucose monitor data into the electronic heal...

This study investigates associations between power at several durations to show inter-relationships of power across a range of durations in sprint track cyclists. The currently-accepted hypothesis peak power holds a near perfect relationship with sprint performance, and thus a near 1:1 slope with power at sprint durations up to 30-s, is tested. The...

With the prevalence of diabetes higher than ever, governments and people with diabetes are facing significant treatment and indirect costs associated with managing their condition. An ultra-low-cost insulin pump is a possible solution to improving health disparities. This article presents test results for an insulin-pump built from low-cost compone...

Pain management is increasingly recognised as a formal medical subspecialty worldwide. Empirical distributions of the nurses’ ratings of a patient’s pain and/or agitation levels and the administered dose of sedative are often positively skewed, and if the joint distribution is non-elliptical, then high nurses’ ratings of a patient’s agitation level...

Objectives A unique dataset of airway flow/pressure from healthy subjects on Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) ventilation was collected. This data can be used to develop or validate models of pulmonary mechanics, and/or to develop methods to identify patient-specific parameters which cannot be measured non-invasively, during CPAP therapy....

Background: Neonatal hypoglycaemia can lead to brain damage and neurocognitive impairment. Neonatal hypoglycaemia is associated with smaller caudate volume in the mid-childhood. We investigated the relationship between neurodevelopmental outcomes and caudate volume and whether this relationship was influenced by neonatal hypoglycaemia. Methods:...

Background: Current methods to diagnose and monitor COPD employ spirometry as the gold standard to identify lung function reduction with reduced forced expiratory volume (FEV1)/vital capacity (VC) ratio. Current methods utilise linear assumptions regarding airway resistance, where nonlinear resistance modelling may provide rapid insight into patie...

This paper presents a computationally simple diagnostic algorithm for breast cancer using a non-invasive Digital Image Elasto Tomography (DIET) system. N=14 women (28 breasts, 13 cancerous) underwent a clinical trial using the DIET system following mammography diagnosis. The screening involves steady state sinusoidal vibrations applied to the free...

A lost-cost open-source electrical impedance tomography (EIT) device was equipped with a novel lidar based workflow to extract torso and electrode position which was then used in the EIT image reconstruction. EIT data was gathered from 9 healthy volunteers (5 male, 4 female) whilst undergoing a controlled breathing protocol. Four different reconstr...

Background and objective Respiratory mechanics of mechanically ventilated patients evolve significantly with time, disease state and mechanical ventilation (MV) treatment. Existing deterministic data prediction methods fail to comprehensively describe the multiple sources of heterogeneity of biological systems. This research presents two respirator...

In this report we present a design for an open source low cost insulin pump. The pump has been designed to provide an alternative to commercially available pumps costing upwards of US$6500, making them inaccessible to many. The hardware described in this article can be produced for a materials cost of US$89.85. Compared to other devices on the mark...

Background: Central blood pressure (BP) better reflects the loading conditions on the major organs and is more closely correlated with future cardiovascular events. The increased invasiveness and risk of infection prevents the routine measurement of central BP. Arterial transfer functions can provide central BP estimates from clinically available...

Jacket structures play an ever-increasing role in meeting the world’s burgeoning energy demand by providing support structure for exploiting offshore wind energy and oil and gas resources. Many of these structures are past their design lifetimes, and thus may have suffered significant degradation, highlighting the importance of investigating their...

Depth cues are crucial to increase user perception and spatial awareness of the remote environment when remotely guiding complex robotic systems. A mixed reality (MR) integrated 3D/2D vision and motion mapping framework for immersive and intuitive telemanipulation of a complex mobile manipulator is presented. The proposed 3D immersive telerobotic s...

Background : Optimal setting of mechanical ventilators is critical for improving outcomes. Accurate, predictive lung mechanics models are effective in optimizing MV settings, but only at a global level as they cannot estimate regional lung volume ventilation to assess the potential of local distension or under-ventilation. This study presents a low...