News

GeekWire, a national technology news resource, has featured Dr. Steele and Dr. Schwartz‘s Walk-DMC in a special series focused on community issues and innovative solutions to societal challenges. Lisa Stiffler reports on the analysis that is used to create Walk-DMC, an assessment tool that uses routinely collected electromyography (EMG) data to identify which kids are the strongest candidates for surgery — and to help develop alternative treatments for children needing a different solution.

“It’s a very complex problem,” said Steele, who is a co-author of a paper explaining the Walk DMC metric published this month in the journal Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. “You can have two individuals who are walking visually nearly identically,” she said, “but how they’re controlling that motion can be very different.”

To read the full article, click HERE.

Our lab’s director, Dr. Kat Steele, and Dr. Michael Schwartz, from Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare, have developed a quantitative assessment of motor control in children with cerebral palsy called Walk-DMC, which could be used to help determine whether or not patients would benefit from aggressive, invasive surgeries to assist in walking and motion. Jennifer Langston reports on the new technique within UWToday. An exert from the article is posted below, but for the full article, read HERE.

“Only about 50 percent of children have significant improvement in their movement after these highly invasive surgeries,” said Kat Steele, a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “Our motivation has really been to figure out how we can push up these success rates.”