Session: Rising Stars of Mechanical Engineering Celebration & Showcase

Paper Number: 148657

148657 - Career: Adaptive Sonification to Improve Balance During Everyday Mobility 

This NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant identifies balance and gait deficits in fall-prone older adults and to deliver personalized auditory biofeedback ("sonified biofeedback") designed to improve dynamic balance while walking. Turning has been linked to recurrent falls in older adults because it imposes mechanical conflict between balancing and changing direction. Falls in older adults frequently lead to injury and sometimes death. Depending on the environment, turning-while-walking can comprise up to 50 percent of steps taken in any given day. Retraining balance strategies used during turning-while-walking has potential to reduce fall risk. This project identifies relationships between person-specific balance strategies used during turning and other factors including physiological and cognitive capabilities - such as strength and capacity for spatial reasoning - as well as environmental factors such as the presence or absence of obstacles. This information will be used to design personalized auditory biofeedback tuned to convey information about movement kinematics and ground reaction forces in a way that facilitates dynamic balance during walking. An initial set of experiments test human perception and motor responses to sonified biofeedback of dynamic balance information. Additional experiments test the ability of fall-prone older adults to use personalized biofeedback to improve dynamic balance during turns. This project advances the national health by developing approaches to diagnose balance deficits in older adults as well as a novel sonified biofeedback approach to improving dynamic balance in that population. The project includes robust education and community engagement activities, including an innovative Artist in Residence program. These activities expose underrepresented groups to cutting-edge engineering and scientific research in a way that is engaging for engineers and young artists alike.

This project tests the hypothesis that interactive sonified biofeedback can improve balance strategies used by fall-risk older adults during turning-while-walking. This project has three research objectives. In the first, the team is conducting human subjects experiments to characterize person-specific relationships between dynamic balance strategies used during turns, physiological and cognitive capabilities, and environmental factors. Participants will walk and turn within the controlled setting of the research lab and outdoors while wearing technology that can sense and transmit movement kinematics and ground reaction forces in real-time. For the second objective, the team is establishing how sonification can be used to train specific balance strategies and the extent to which those strategies can be retained and used without dependency on concurrent biofeedback. Working in conjunction with a sound designer, the PI will develop soundscapes that sonify balance metrics during unconstrained body movements, evaluate their ability to modulate measures of stability in real-time during repeated training sessions, and test their ability to elicit long-lasting behavioral change. In the third objective, the team is testing the ability of machine learning models to diagnose person-specific balance deficits during turns compared to clinician diagnoses, and to design personalized biofeedback soundscapes that can mitigate clinician-diagnosed balance deficits.This project advances fundamental understanding of a future intelligent machines that can communicate with and shape the behavior of its human user through physical interaction.

Presenting Author: Antonia Zaferiou Stevens Institute of Technology

Presenting Author Biography: Dr. Zaferiou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Presidential Faculty Fellow at Stevens Institute of Technology, where she directs the Musculoskeletal Control and Dynamics lab. She received her BE in Mechanical Engineering from The Cooper Union and MS and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California. After her doctoral studies, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Michigan. Before joining Stevens Institute of Technology, she directed a biomechanics lab in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Rush University Medical Center. Her research has been funded by an NSF CAREER grant, the Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Engineering Research Career Development program (NIH-funded K-12 program), and a Major League Baseball. Dr. Zaferiou is also a dedicated educator and mentor in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) education activities.

Authors:

Antonia Zaferiou Stevens Institute of Technology