Panagiotis Artemiadis
Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, University of Delaware
Human gait rehabilitation using robotics and neuromuscular modeling
Abstract
Gait impairment due to neurological disorders or injuries has become one of the most important problems of the 21st century. However, current rehabilitation practice is non-patient specific and usually has little beneficial effect on the impaired walker, mainly due to the lack of a comprehensive data-driven model of sensorimotor mechanisms of human gait. This talk will focus on a new approach to robotic interventions for gait therapy using a neuromuscular model in conjunction with a novel robotic system, called Variable Stiffness Treadmill (VST) developed in Dr. Artemiadis’ lab. The VST can deliver a unique unilateral stiffness intervention paradigm to walkers, which is shown to have beneficial after-effects that last for more than 500 steps after the intervention has been removed. Moreover, the effect these perturbations have can be described by a complex neuromusculoskeletal model, allowing for tailoring, and tuning the robot-assisted interventions to each patient.
Biography
Panos Artemiadis received his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the NTUA, Athens, Greece, in 2009. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Mechanical Engineering Department, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2009 to 2011, and subsequently took a position as Assistant Professor, and later as Associate Professor, at Arizona State University. In 2019 he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware, where he is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Master in Science of Robotics. His research interests include the areas of rehabilitation robotics, control systems, system identification, brain-machine interfaces, and human-swarm interaction. He serves as Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor in many scientific journals, and four of his papers have been nominated or awarded best paper awards. He is the recipient of the 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award and the 2014 AFOSR Young Investigator Award, as well as the 2017 ASU Fulton Exemplar Faculty Award. He has (co-)authored over 110 papers in scientific journals and peer-reviewed conferences, as well as 9 patents.