Projects
General Research Interests
Body functions such as balancing during quiet standing, sitting, and walking, and grasping are essential in activities of daily living. Many disabled patients cannot carry out these tasks themselves. To improve upon the patient's disability, a number of rehabilitation devices have been developed with the intention of either generating these functions artificially or to support patients while they perform these functions themselves. Although many of the existing rehabilitation devices were designed with exceptional ingenuity, there is a general consensus in the field that contemporary rehabilitation systems are not sufficiently sophisticated and that better rehabilitation treatments and devices still need to be developed.
Our research should lead towards the development of more advanced rehabilitation systems, neuroprostheses, sophisticated man-machine interfaces, and a variety of monitoring and assessment devices that will be applied to evaluate a patient's disability and to track patient improvements due to therapy. In particular, we intend to design these systems such that they mimic or at least take into consideration the actual sensory-motor interactions that are responsible for control and implementation of complex motor functions in humans. It is well known that distributed nonlinear body components and subsystems such as mechanoreceptors, vestibular sensation, central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, and muscles are responsible for coordination and execution of complex motor functions. Although many of these body subsystems have been extensively studied and modeled, very little is known about the behaviour of these subsystems as an integrated system. We intend to focus our research towards understanding how these integrated body systems function and how this knowledge can be applied to develop new rehabilitation devices and treatments. The sensory-motor interaction approach is one of the methodologies that can be applied to provide insight into the integrated systems’ behaviour. The intent of our research is to use this approach to look into issues such as:
Identifying control functions and tasks that are carried out by neuronal centres in the spinal cord is a very important part of the research discussed above. If it could be demonstrated that certain control functions are preserved in the spinal cord below the level of the lesion after a spinal cord injury, then it would be of practical interest to try to evoke these functions and use them together with an external rehabilitation system to regenerate a desired motor function. Although challenging, this approach presents the most attractive method for medical doctors and therapists since it stimulates recovery and retraining of retained motor functions, which in recent years was found to be an effective way to rehabilitate many hemiplegic and spinal cord injured subjects.
Research Projects Current Projects:
Completed Projects:
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