Awards

RehabWeek/ISPO Canada Best Student Poster: Brandon Nguyen!

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Brandon Nguyen standing in front of his poster at RehabWeek wearing a dark blue shirt. His poster features images of the smartphone app and graphs.

Congrats to Brandon Nguyen who was awarded the Best Student Poster award by the International Society of Prosthetics & Orthotics Canada at RehabWeek in Toronto this past week! Brandon presented his work, “Accuracy and repeatability of using smartphone sensors for orthotic tuning.”

Check out his abstract and poster.

You can also download the HuskySTEPS app to try it out yourself.

The ISPO student award winners for 2019 rehab week, including four students with Brandon in the middle, and the two main conference award organizers.

This work, in collaboration with Nick Baicoianu and Darrin Howell, examined the accuracy of measuring shank-to-vertical angle during walking with a smartphone compared to traditional motion capture systems. Shank-to-vertical angle is a measure used by orthotists and therapists for AFO tuning and gait training. The short story – placing the smartphone on the front of the shank can measure shank-vertical-angle with errors less than two degrees compared to traditional motion capture systems, with high intra-rater and inter-rater repeatability across days.

Brandon dressed in his purple graduation regalia in front of the UW fountain

Brandon also recently finished his Doctorate of Physical Therapy (DPT) degree at the University of Washington – making him one of the rare engineer-therapists. In recognition of his efforts to combine academic scholarship with social awareness and concern, he was awarded the 2019 UW Graduate Medal.

Congratulations Brandon! We are so excited to see what you do next.

Spasticity Research Award Nominations

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Nicole Zaino (wearing glasses) poses on campus

Walking takes energy – but for kids with cerebral palsy, walking can be exhausting. The average child with cerebral palsy consumes two times the amount of energy during walking compared to typically-developing peers – that is the equivalent of jogging or climbing stairs!

The reasons for why walking takes so much energy for children with cerebral palsy remains largely unknown. The extra muscle activity caused by spasticity has often been theorized as a large contributing factor. If this was true, we would expect that treatments that reduce spasticity, like selective dorsal rhizotomy, could dramatically reduce energy during walking.

Led by Nicole Zaino, a new PhD student in the lab, and our collaborator Mike Schwartz at Gillette Children’s Specialty we have been investigating this question. By analyzing energy consumption for children with cerebral palsy who underwent rhizotomy and matched peers with cerebral palsy, we were determined that reducing spasticity does not lead to dramatic decreases in energy consumption.

This research has been nominated as a finalist for two awards at the International Society of Biomechanics Conference. This work was selected as one of 5 finalist for the Clinical Biomechanics Award. Nicole will also present as one of the finalists for the David Winter Young Investigator Award. The final awards will be announced at the conference in Calgary the first week of August. Good luck Nicole!

You can learn more about the study and read the preprint on BioRxiv:

Spasticity reduction in children with cerebral palsy is not associated with reduced energy consumption during walking

Alyssa Spomer named TL1 scholar, 2019 Cohort

Nicole Awards, News

Alyssa Spomer stands in front of the fountain on the UW campus dressed in a black shirt and white cardigan.We are very proud to announce that Alyssa Spomer is part of a cohort of 16 new trainees in the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) TL1 Translational Research Training Program. This is a one-year mentored research training program in translational science in a cross-disciplinary community with training, career development, and team science skills.

Project Title: “Evaluating motor control plasticity to inform the development of biofeedback technologies for use in cerebral palsy rehabilitation”. Congratulations Alyssa!