Abstract:
Part 1: Clinical assessment of spasticity has been known to be poor in reliability. There are many research efforts to improve reliability of spasticity assessment including robotic devices providing consistent assessment protocol as well as simulating spastic responses for training raters. This presentation will discuss solutions to be usable in clinical practices and introduce relevant research activities at KAIST neuro-rehabilitation engineering laboratory. We have developed simple tools for quantitative assessment and simulation of spasticity and tested whether AI can learn expert raters’ decision making process. Part 2: While hand manipulation is essential in upper limb function, hand rehabilitation is the most difficult and challenging in upper limb rehabilitation post brain injury due to complexity in hand compared to other joints in upper limb. There are many hand rehabilitation robots such as exoskeleton and soft gloves. Most of them are not capable of implementing dexterous hand manipulation such as various types of grasping and in-hand manipulation. This presentation will introduce a biomimetic design of soft hand rehabilitation robot specifically for natural hand opening and dexterous hand manipulation. First, hand anatomy will be reviewed in brief followed by development of BiomHED (biomimetic hand exotendon device). Second, a pilot result on elastic glove with transcutaneous HFAC (high frequency alternating current) for stroke survivors will be presented.
Short Bio:
Prof. Hyung-Soon Park received PhD degree in mechanical engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 2004. From 2004 to 2013, he worked as a research associate & research scientist in Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL, 2004~2009) and staff scientist in National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD, 2009~2013). Since 2013, he is an associate professor of the department of mechanical engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He has conducted many research projects in the field of rehabilitation engineering and had a lot of experience in collaborating with clinicians for clinical research using advanced engineering techniques. He has published over 121 papers (50 international journal papers, 71 conference proceedings) and 15 patents. He has completed over 20 research projects (all in the area of rehabilitation engineering) funded by US government or Korean government. He is an expert in robotics and control from his PhD and has a lot of experience in applying the advanced robotics technology for developing new interventions in rehabilitation; therefore, he is recognized as a robotics engineer experienced in clinical research of rehabilitation medicine.
Host: Professor Liz Hsiao-Wecksler
