Michelle J. Johnson, Ph.D., is currently Associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a secondary appointment as an Associate professor in Bioengineering and is a member of the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics graduate group. She has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering
and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, with an emphasis in mechatronics, robotics, and design, from Stanford University. She completed a NSF-NATO post-doctoral fellowship at the Advanced Robotics Technology and Systems Laboratory at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar for 2020-2021. She directs the Rehabilitation Robotic Research and Design Laboratory located at the Pennsylvania Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine. The lab is also affiliated with the General Robotics Automation Sensing Perception (GRASP) Lab. Dr. Johnson’s lab specializes in the design, development, and therapeutic use of novel, affordable, intelligent robotic assistants for rehabilitation in high and low-resource environments with an emphasis on using robotics and sensors to quantify upper limb motor function in adults and children with brain injury or at risk for brain injury.

Her research lab can be found at https://www.med.upenn.edu/rehabilitation-robotics-lab/

Title: Reimagining robotic walkers for real-world outdoor play environments with insights from legged robots: a scoping review

DOI: 10.1080/17483107.2021.1926563

Abstract:

Purpose: For children with mobility impairments, without cognitive delays, who want to participate in outdoor activities, existing assistive technology (AT) to support their needs is limited. In this review, we investigate the control and design of a selection of robotic walkers while exploring a selection of legged robots to develop solutions that address this gap in robotic AT.

Method: We performed a comprehensive literature search from four main databases: PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore. The keywords used in the search were the following: “walker”, “rollator”, “smart walker”, “robotic walker”, “robotic rollator”. Studies were required to discuss the control or design of robotic walkers to be considered. A total of 159 papers were analyzed.

Results: From the 159 papers, 127 were excluded since they failed to meet our inclusion criteria. The total number of papers analyzed included publications that utilized the same device, therefore we classified the remaining 32 studies into groups based on the type of robotic walker used. This paper reviewed 15 different types of robotic walkers.

Conclusions: The ability of many-legged robots to negotiate and transition between a range of unstructured substrates suggests several avenues of future consideration whose pursuit could benefit robotic AT, particularly regarding the present limitations of wheeled paediatric robotic walkers for children’s daily outside use.IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATIONChildren with lower limb disabilities can benefit from assistive technology designed for daily usage in outdoor surroundings.An extension of existing robotic assistive technology that allows the user to travel safely on irregular surfaces both indoors and outdoors is needed.Approaches used to solve research problems in the field of robotics (outside of the rehabilitation area) can be used to address problems that robotic assistive technology currently faces.There is a need for more research on the development of robotic assistive technology for children with mobility impairments without cognitive delays.

Dr. Hermano Igo Krebs has been a Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department and the Director of The77Lab (http://the77lab.mit.edu/). He also holds an affiliate position as an Adjunct Professor at University of Maryland School of Medicine, Department of Neurology, and as a Visiting Professor at Fujita Health University, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (Japan), at Osaka University, Mechanical Science and Bioengineering Department (Japan), and at Loughborough University, Rehabilitation Robotics of The Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical, and Manufacturing Engineering (UK).

He is a Fellow of the IEEE and was nominated by two of IEEE societies: IEEE-EMBS (Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society) and IEEE-RAS (Robotics and Automation Society) to this distinguished engineering status “for contributions to rehabilitation robotics and the understanding of neuro-rehabilitation.” He received “The 2009 Isabelle and Leonard H. Goldenson Technology and Rehabilitation Award,” from the Cerebral Palsy International Research Foundation (CPIRF) and the 2015 IEEE-RAS INABA Technical Award for Innovation leading to Production “for contributions to medical technology innovation and translation into commercial applications for Rehabilitation Robotics.” He was selected as a 2021 IEEE-EMBS Distinguished Lecture.

Entrepreneurial Experience

He was one of the founders, member of the Board of Directors, and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Interactive Motion Technologies from 1998 to 2016. He successfully sold it to Bionik Laboratories, a publicly traded company, where he served as its Chief Science Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors until July 2017. He later founded 4Motion Robotics to revolutionize the way rehabilitation medicine is practiced today by applying robotics and information technology to assist, enhance, and quantify rehabilitation.

Links for more information:

Home | The 77 Lab (mit.edu)

MECHE PEOPLE: Hermano Igo Krebs | MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering

Title: Starting A Venture Company

View a recording here

Abstract:

“Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. . . trends are now starting to converge and I can envision a future in which robotics devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives. Technologies such as distributed computing, voice and visual recognition, and wireless broadband connectively will open the door to a new generation of autonomous devices that enable computers to perform tasks in the physical world on our behalf. We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not
physically present.” – Bill Gates

Disruptive technology is a term coined to characterize an innovation that disrupts an existing market or way of doing things and creates a new value network. The concept was first described at Harvard Business School by Clayton M. Christensen, who described the concept in 1996 as: “Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.”;

Eventually with improvement, borrowing from Malcolm Gladwell, the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point is reached and the old practices and existing value network is abandoned in favor of the new one.

Here I will discuss my experience as an entrepreneur and whether rehabilitation robotics has achieved its “tipping point”.

Dr. Cynthia A. Chestek, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Chestek received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 2005 and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2010. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Department of Neurosurgery with the Braingate 2 clinical trial. She is now an associate professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, where she joined the faculty in 2012. She runs the Cortical Neural Prosthetics Lab, which focuses on brain and nerve control of finger movements as well as high-density carbon fiber electrode arrays. She is the author of 53 full-length scientific articles. Her research interests include high-density interfaces to the nervous system for the control of multiple degrees of freedom hand and finger movements.

Title: “Neural Interfaces for Controlling Finger Movements” View a recording here

Abstract

Brain machine interfaces or neural prosthetics have the potential to restore movement to people with paralysis or amputation, bridging gaps in the nervous system with an artificial device. Microelectrode arrays can record from hundreds of individual neurons in the motor cortex, and machine learning can be used to generate useful control signals from this neural activity.

Performance can already surpass the current state of the art in assistive technology in terms of controlling the endpoint of computer cursors or prosthetic hands. The natural next step in this progression is to control more complex movements at the level of individual fingers. Our lab has approached this problem in three different ways.

For people with upper limb amputation, we acquire signals from individual peripheral nerve branches using small muscle grafts to amplify the signal. After a successful study in animals, human study participants have recently been able to control individual fingers online using indwelling EMG electrodes within these grafts.

For spinal cord injury, where no peripheral signals are available, we implant Utah arrays into finger areas of the motor cortex, and have successfully decoded flexion and extension in multiple fingers. Decoding “spiking band” activity at much lower sampling rates, we recently showed that power consumption of an implantable device could be reduced by an order of magnitude compared to existing broadband approaches, and fit within the specification of existing systems for upper limb functional electrical stimulation.

Finally, finger control is ultimately limited by the number of independent electrodes that can be placed within the cortex or the nerves, and this is in turn limited by the extent of glial scarring surrounding an electrode. Therefore, we developed an electrode array based on 8 um carbon fibers, no bigger than the neurons themselves to enable chronic recording of single units with minimal scarring.

The long- term goal of this work is to make neural interfaces for the restoration of hand movement a clinical reality for everyone who has lost the use of their hands.

Learn more about her current research here

Professor David B. Grayden is Clifford Chair of Neural Engineering in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Melbourne School of Engineering and the Graeme Clark Institute for Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Grayden’s main research interests are in understanding how the brain processes information, how best to present information to the brain using medical bionics, such as the bionic ear and bionic eye, and how to record information from the brain, such as for brain-machine interfaces.

He is also conducting research in epileptic seizure prediction and electrical stimulation to prevent or stop epileptic seizures, and electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve to control inflammatory bowel disease.

Together with the Melbourne Business School, he teaches BioDesign Innovation, an immersive course in how to innovate in Medical Technologies for Master of Engineering and Master of Business Administration students.

Title: “Brain Recording and Stimulation with the Stentrode”

View a recording here

Abstract

Neural interfaces have the potential to restore lost motor or sensory function and alleviate neurological symptoms for people with spinal cord injury, motor neuron disease, limb amputation, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and potentially other conditions. However, to provide the best level of performance, these systems have so far required direct implantation of electrodes into the brain via open craniotomy.

We have developed a stent-electrode array, called the “Stentrode”, that is placed within a blood vessel in the brain where they can chronically record and stimulate brain activity. This presentation will describe the development of the Stentrode from idea to first-in-human trials.

Learn more about his current research here

Dr. Zahra Moussavi is a professor, a former Canada Research Chair, and the founder and director of Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program at University of Manitoba. Her current research focuses are on medical devices instrumentation and signal analysis for sleep apnea management and Alzheimer’s diagnosis and treatment using virtual reality, rTMS and EVestG technologies.  She is the recipient of several awards including the “2018 Technical Excellence Award,” Engineers Geoscientists Manitoba, Oct. 2018, “Canada’s Most Powerful Women (Top 100)”, “Manitoba Distinguished Women” in 2014 and IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer, 2014 and 2019. She has published more than 278 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conferences, and has given 105 invited talks/seminars including 2 Tedx Talks and 9 keynote speaker seminars at national and international conferences. Aside from academic work, on her spare time, she writes science articles for public; also has developed and offered memory fitness programs for aging population.

Title: “Non-Pharmaceutical Treatment of Dementia”

Abstract

Memory and cognitive declines are associated with normal brain aging but are also precursors to dementia, in particular Alzheimer’s disease.  While currently there is no cure or “vaccine” against dementia, based on brain’s plasticity, there are hopes to delay the onset or to slow the progression of disease.

Alzheimer’s disease is multi-facet condition; thus, the key to its management is in multi-disciplinary approaches. The clinical treatment of Alzheimer’s is basically a family of cholinesterase inhibitors like Aricept that the majority have a very low response rate. In this talk, I will review and discuss non-pharmaceutical treatments such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial alternative current stimulation (tACS) with and without Cognitive Exercises. Some pilot results of our current clinical trials will be presented.

Learn more about her current research here