Wearable Technology for Human Motion Analysis and Gait
Training
Mechanical Engineering Professor Damiano Zanotto
Assistant Professor in
Mechanical Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT
The wearable technology
field is expected to grow at a rate of 18% year-over-year in the next 5 years.
Emerging applications in wearable robotics include active prostheses,
exoskeletons, and soft exosuits for rehabilitation, personal assistance, and
performance augmentation. On the other hand, new wearable sensors have been
developed to measure biomechanical or physiological variables, with
applications in human motion analysis and classification, diagnosis and digital
phenotyping, injury prevention, human-machine interaction as well as virtual
and augmented reality.
This talk is organized
into two parts. First, we will introduce new adaptive controllers for a powered
orthosis designed to assist recovery of walking function in patients with
hemiparesis. Then, we will discuss how the vast expressive power of
learning-based models can be leveraged to extract accurate kinematic and
kinetic gait parameters from noisy data measured by foot-worn sensors during
out-of-the-lab walking and running tasks, and how these methods have been used
to characterize gait in several clinical populations.
BIOGRAPHY
Damiano Zanotto is an
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute of
Technology (Hoboken, NJ), where he directs the Wearable Robotic Systems Laboratory. He received his B.S. and M.S.
degrees (cum laude) in mechanical engineering and his Ph.D. in industrial
engineering with a concentration in mechatronics, all from the University of
Padua (Italy) in 2005, 2007, and 2011, respectively. Before joining Stevens, he
was an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University.
Dr. Zanotto’ s research
interests include design and control of wearable robots for assistance and
rehabilitation and wearable technology for human motion analysis. His research
has been supported by NSF, NJHF, Muscular Dystrophy Association and Wallace H.
Coulter Foundation. Dr. Zanotto is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and of
the Columbia University Translational Fellowship. He regularly serves as an
associate editor for several international conferences of the IEEE Robotics and
Automation Society (RAS). He also serves in the IEEE-RAS Technical Committee on
Mechanisms and Design and in the Editorial Board of Wearable
Technologies (Cambridge University Press).