Category: Publication

Spotlight on Fredi Mino: Inspiring the Next Generation of Bioengineers

Our lab is excited to share that Fredi is featured in a new online educational module created for middle school students through University of Utah Health and the Genetic Science Learning Center.

The module introduces students to bioengineering through the lens of prosthetics, and our team partnered with the Genetic Science Learning Center to help shape the content. As part of the project, Fredi appears in several videos, guiding viewers through the lab and talking about his path in engineering and prosthetics research.

The series also includes extensive b-roll footage from the Craig H. Neilsen Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) shared spaces and highlights many of the researchers who work there, giving students an inside look at what it’s like to work in a modern rehabilitation and bioengineering environment.

You can explore the module here:
Bioengineering & Prosthetics – Working in a Lab
https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/careers/lab/

BIOS Named 2025 Innovation Awards Honoree

We’re proud to announce that BIOS, a company that spun out of our lab, has been named an Emerging Honoree in the Healthcare & Life Sciences category of the 2025 Utah Business Innovation Awards. This annual recognition celebrates the groundbreaking companies and technologies shaping Utah’s future — and BIOS’ inclusion highlights how research born in our lab is transforming lives beyond the university walls.

BIOS is pioneering a Universal Neural Interface that intercepts, captures, and edits neural signals — creating a bridge between the human nervous system and advanced prosthetic devices. This breakthrough technology addresses a critical challenge in prosthetic adoption: many users abandon devices due to limited control or lack of sensory feedback. BIOS’ innovations are designed to change that, making prosthetics that move and feel like a biological limb.

The company’s recognition is more than just an award — it’s a testament to the power of research translation and the impact of collaborative innovation. What began as an ambitious idea in our lab has grown into a technology with the potential to transform the lives of people with limb loss and neurological conditions.

We congratulate the BIOS team on this well-deserved honor and look forward to continuing our shared mission of advancing human-machine integration to improve quality of life.

🏆 Read the full announcement on Utah Business.

New publication in the Journal of Neural Engineering

A paper led by Caleb Thomson was recently published in the Journal of Neural Engineering. The paper is titled: “Enhancing neuroprosthesis calibration: the advantage of integrating prior training over exclusive use of new data” and was coauthored by Troy N Tully, Eric S Stone, Christian B Morrell, Erik J Scheme, David J Warren, Douglas T Hutchinson, Gregory A Clark and Jacob A George.

LinkedIn Post

Link to Paper

Dr. Jacob George featured as expert in article discussing spinal cord stimulator

A recent article by Luisa Torres, PhD, in Drug Discovery News featured Dr. Jacob George in a discussion about the use of spinal cord stimulators in patients with lower-limb amputations. A recent Nature Biomedical Engineering study used spinal cord stimulation to restore the sense of touch, improve balance, and reduce phantom limb pain in patients with amputation below the knee. Dr. George discussed the benefits and use of such technology as an industry expert in response to this study. The full article can be read here.

Dr. George Presents at Vitae!

Dr. George presented at the Vitae event today. Vitae is a hallmark event recognizing research excellence across University of Utah Health. This year Vitae celebrated six rising-star faculty who are on the forefront of their professions as they shared stories of their science and how they got to where they are today. Vitae annually highlights investigators and their pioneering research programs. The program seeds new
collaborations and development strategies by humanizing research through story. The Vitae annual symposium is presented by Vice Chair for Faculty Affairs and Development, Department of Internal Medicine, and Michael Rubin, MD, PhD, on behalf of the Office of the Associate Vice President for Research.

Myoelectric Controls Symposium 2022

The first in-person conference for our lab was a huge success! Our Lab had four podium presentations and two posters at the Myoelectric Controls Symposium (MEC) in New Brunswick, Canada. We took home both 1st and 2nd place student awards! We’re very proud of all our students and their hard work!

MEC is a mix of researchers, companies, patients, therapists, and clinicians dealing in upper-limb prosthetics, and it is always an enjoyable conference! Special thanks go to the University of New Brunswick (UNB) for hosting the conference!

Click here to view the conference proceedings

New Manuscript on Robust Thought-Controlled Exoskeletons

Our work on robust thought-controlled exoskeletons in collaboration with the Utah Bionic Engineering Lab is now published online in Frontiers in NeuroRobotics. We explored how a powered hip exoskeleton impacts muscle activity, and the implications of that on real-time EMG control. We showed that lower-limb and lower-back muscle activity change non-linearly as a result of increasing exoskeleton assistance - this makes real-time EMG control difficult because the act of controlling (assisting) changes the input signal. The good news is that nonlinear neural networks are capable of generalizing predictions of torque across different levels of exoskeleton assistance, when explicit training data is provided. However, a common linear model (i.e., a Kalman filter) is not capable of the same generalization. Lastly, given that explicit training data on every level of exoskeleton assistance may not be feasible, we show that, when time is limited, training data for EMG control of exoskeletons should use at least 35 gait cycles and emphasize the highest levels of assistance first! The full article is available open-access here: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2021.700823

Two Papers Accepted at IEEE EMBC

Two papers from the NeuroRobotics Lab were accepted at the 2021 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society! The first paper, authored by graduate student Caleb Thomson, is titled "A Recurrent Neural Network Provides Stable Across-Day Prosthetic Control for a Human Amputee with Implanted Intramuscular Electromyographic Recording Leads." The second paper, authored by graduate students Taylor Hansen and Marshall Trout, is titled "A Bionic Hand for Semi-Autonomous Fragile Object Manipulation via Proximity and Pressure Sensors." The papers will be presented virtually at the annual conference between October 31 – November 4, 2021.