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Assistant Professor
Shirley Ryan AbilityLab / Northwestern
I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
I am a Physician-Scientist in the Center for Bionic Medicine at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and Assistant Professor at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. My long-standing interest is the development and translation of novel highly accessible technologies to enhance recovery and function for people with disabilities. Towards this goal I have pursued diverse training in addition to rehabilitation medicine to develop the necessary skills, including undergraduate training in electrical engineering and biochemistry and a Ph.D. in system neuroscience, which was funded under an F30 award from the National Institute of Mental Health. I completed a 5-year residency track with a protected year for research, during which I collaborated with John Roger’s lab at Northwestern University to develop a platform of wearable sensors for rehabilitation. Last year I received a grant from the American Neuromuscular Foundation to enable these sensors to monitor spasticity in people with neurologic injuries. Work using these sensors to allow people with tetraplegia to control a smartphone also recently received the American Spinal Cord Injury Association Anthony F. DiMarco MD Fellowship Award. I have also been developing technologies to combine the movement data from sensors with video-based analysis to capture kinematics, including performing video-based gait analysis. I have been collaborating with Tasos Karakostas who directs the clinical gait assessment laboratory at SRAlab to leverage a unique dataset he has collected over the last dataset to improve the accuracy of human pose estimation when used for gait analysis on patient populations. My preliminary work with Ankit Patel uses this dataset to train a neural network that accurately estimates numerous gait parameters from monocular video and forms the basis of this proposal and is currently under review.
