Damiano Zanotto Seminar

Speaker:
Damiano Zanotto, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Stevens Institute of Technology

Title:
Wearable  Technology for Gait Training and Gait Analysis

Abstract:
The wearable technology field has grown an average of 16% year on year from 2014 to 2017. Emerging applications in wearable robotics include exoskeletons, powered orthoses and prostheses and soft exosuits for rehabilitation, personal assistance, and performance augmentation. On the other hand, new wearable sensors and related methods have been developed to measure biomechanical or physiological variables, with applications in human motion analysis and classification, diagnosis, injury prevention, human-machine interaction as well as virtual and augmented reality. This talk is organized into two parts. First, we will introduce a novel design of cable-driven powered ankle-foot-orthosis for gait training and a compliant adaptive controller to assist recovery of gait symmetry in patients with hemiparesis. Then, we will discuss how the vast expressive power of learning-based models can be leveraged to extract accurate kinematic and kinetic gait parameters from noisy data measured by wearable sensors during walking and running.

Biosketch:
Dr. Damiano Zanotto is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he directs the Wearable Robotic Systems Laboratory. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees (cum laude) in mechanical engineering and his Ph.D. in industrial engineering with a concentration in mechatronics, all from the University of Padua (Italy) in 2005, 2007, and 2011, respectively. Before joining Stevens, he was an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Delaware. Dr. Zanotto’s research interests include design and control of wearable robots for assistance and rehabilitation, wearable technology for motion analysis, as well as cable-driven parallel robots. His research has been supported by NSF, New Jersey Health Foundation and Wallace H. Coulter Foundation. Dr. Zanotto has authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and holds two patents in the fields of wearable technology and rehabilitation robotics. He is a recipient of the Columbia University Translational Fellowship (2015). He currently serves in the IEEE-RAS Technical Committee on Mechanisms and Design, and regularly serves as an associate editor for several international conferences of the IEEE.