Engineering to enhance human mobility, play, and exploration
We are very excited to welcome Darrin Howell to our research team. Darrin earned is BS in Neuroscience here at the University of Washington and is now a research scientist within our lab. In addition to the exciting news of our new staff member, Darrin’s first day involved helping install the new AMPLab treadmill. A majority of our lab’s data collections will occur in this new shared space with Electrical Engineering and Rehabilitation Medicine. Welcome, Darrin!
Peer-reviewed paper at European Conference on Computer Vision:
30-second videos from a depth camera can be used in the evaluation of infants with spinal muscular atrophy.
Abstract: Spinal Muscular Atrophy is the most common genetic cause of infant death. Due to its severity, there is a need for methods for automated estimation of disease progression. In this paper we propose a Convolutional-Neural-Network (CNN) model to estimate disease progression during infants’ natural behavior. With the proposed methodology, we were able to predict each child’s score on current behavior-based clinical exams with an average per-subject error of 6.96 out of 72 points (<10 % difference), using 30-second videos in leave-one-subject-out-cross-validation setting. When simple statistics were used over 30-second video-segments to estimate a score for longer videos, we obtained an average error of 5.95 (∼8 % error rate). By showing promising results on a small dataset (N = 70, 2-minute samples, which were handled as 1487, 30-second video segments), our methodology demonstrates that it is possible to benefit from CNNs on small datasets by proper design and data handling choices.
Crosscut.com, a non-profit pacific northwest news source shares Jayna’s story and her work with the Ability and Innovation Lab. To read more, click HERE.
Congratulations to Jessica for being acknowledged by the Department of Mechanical Engineering for her academic achievements and potential for success within her masters studies.
Jessica is dedicated to creating a pediatric exoskeleton which promotes improved walking patterns during daily life, outside of therapy sessions. This fellowship will allow Jessica to devote more time towards her research and studies. Congrats!
This past Friday, the University unleashed its most ambitious philanthropic campaign, UW Together. The Ability & Innovation Lab was honored to have a team of undergraduate’s work featured, an elbow-driven orthosis for Jayna.
This story is now featured in the Seattle Times NW Showcase section, and Kat, our Director, is featured in an ad to the right of the story. To read and watch the video, CLICK HERE. We are proud to partner with the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE) here in the College of Engineering. Innovation occurs at the intersection of multiple disciplines, and Together we can change the world.
Go Dawgs and Go Biomechanics!