Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

By now it has become a cliché the statement that the population in industrial world is aging and hence the problem of physical agility is a serious health problem. Moreover this issue is aggravated even with younger population due to our sedative life style. It also is an undeniable (perhaps even too obvious) fact that every human's anatomy and physiology is different. In recognition of this fact we are focusing in our efforts in development of personalized models of kinematic and dynamics of an individual during physical activities, using System Identification methodology.

The above mentioned kinematic and dynamical models are facilitated by two recent developments:
1. Availability of various relatively inexpensive/affordable and noninvasive devices that can deliver the necessary parameters of the position, velocity, acceleration, masses of not only the body but individual limbs, forces generated during various physical activities. These devices are not only the standard cameras, motion capture, force plates and force sensors, Inertial measuring devices, but also hand held ultrasound cameras, Electromyography, Acoustic Myography, real time MRI infrared sensors measuring oxygen in the blood. More advanced sensors are rapidly developing.

2. Mathematical and computational tools coming mainly from the field of robotics, control theory and optimization theory that afford to reliably process all the measurements, interpret them so that they generate the individual kinematic and dynamic predictive models of the physical performance of the individual. These models predict not only the physical performance of the individual but also delineate the weaknesses of the individual.

3. Our approach is to measure/estimate the kinematic/dynamic parameters, then model and based on the performance we design interventions, i.e assistive devices to help the individual better function in daily activities.

In this presentation we will show, how we use measurement of the kinematic and dynamic parameters of the individual, we will be testing the validity of our approach/our predictive performance on both healthy Subjects here at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco medical School. Our experimental paradigm is anchored in sit-to-stand exercise.