Category: Publication

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.