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MEAM Seminar: “Robots and Mechatronic Systems can help us identify, assess, and treat Motor and Cognitive Impairment after Brain Injury”
September 22, 2020 at 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) indicate that in 2017 about 12.7% of adults and children had some form of disability. Stroke is the leading cause of serious long-term disability with ~7 million in the US, which will increase by 20.5% by 2030. Cerebral Palsy is the leading cause of serious long-term disability in children with reports suggesting that 1 in 323 children in the US have CP which represent approximately ~230,000 children in the US. Both these diseases result in varying levels of motor and cognitive impairment due to brain injury which affects then affects the persons ability to complete activities of daily living and fully participate in society. Increasingly advanced technologies are being used to support identification, diagnosis, assessment, and therapy for patients with brain injury. Specifically, robot and mechatronic systems can provide patients, physicians and rehabilitation clinical providers with additional support to care for and improve the quality of life of children and adults with motor and cognitive impairment. This talk will provide a brief introduction to the area of rehabilitation robotics and ,via case studies, illustrate how we develop and use technology-assisted rehabilitation systems to assess motor and cognitive impairment, detect early evidence of functional impairment, and augment therapy in high and low-resource settings.
Michelle J. Johnson
Associate Professor, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Michelle J. Johnson, Ph.D., is currently a tenured 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 Bachelors 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 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 Automated 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.