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Summary Sentence: Join us to discover wireless and wearable technology at the GT-Bionics lab that can harness the power of voluntary tongue motion in people with the most severe physical disabilities (tetraplegia) for human-computer interaction and environment control.
Full Summary: Human tongue and oral musculature have a huge representation in the motor cortex that rivals that of hands and fingers. They also have their own direct hotline to the brain through cranial nerves, which are well protected against physical damage and rarely affected by neurological diseases. They are naturally evolved to be part of both human digestive system and speech apparatus, and offer many degrees of freedom. Over the last few years we have developed a wireless and wearable technology at GT-Bionics lab that can harness the power of voluntary tongue motion in people with the most severe physical disabilities (tetraplegia) for human-computer interaction and environment control. Now, we have gone further and adopted the tongue motion for neuro-rehabilitation of the upper limbs and speech to remedy some of the most common consequences of stroke, which is the leading cause of serious, long-term disability in the United States, affecting 795,000 people per year.
Maysam GhovanlooTopic:
Human tongue and oral musculature have a huge representation in the motor cortex that rivals that of hands and fingers. They also have their own direct hotline to the brain through cranial nerves, which are well protected against physical damage and rarely affected by neurological diseases. They are naturally evolved to be part of both human digestive system and speech apparatus, and offer many degrees of freedom. Over the last few years we have developed a wireless and wearable technology at GT-Bionics lab that can harness the power of voluntary tongue motion in people with the most severe physical disabilities (tetraplegia) for human-computer interaction and environment control. Now, we have gone further and adopted the tongue motion for neuro-rehabilitation of the upper limbs and speech to remedy some of the most common consequences of stroke, which is the leading cause of serious, long-term disability in the United States, affecting 795,000 people per year. It turns out that by marrying the tongue motion and an exoskeleton, we can have those suffering from hemiplegia directly participate in their own rehabilitation paradigm with little or even no input from their physical therapists. The active participation of the patients in the therapy may accelerate the rate of recovery from stroke even beyond the customary care with only a fraction of its cost. It has also been shown that visualizing the tongue motion, and providing it to the patients suffering from speech disorders in the forms of an effective biofeedback can assist and accelerate the rate speech-language therapy. I will talk about some of the new technologies that we are developing for these purposes, and some of the preliminary results we have achieved so far. There are also several opportunities to get involved with this research, which I will mention at the end.
Speaker Bio:
Maysam Ghovanloo received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, and the M.S. degree in biomedical engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 1997. He also received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2003 and 2004. Dr. Ghovanloo was an assistant professor in the Department of ECE at the North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC from 2004 to 2007. Since 2007 he has been with the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he is an associate professor and the founding director of the GT-Bionics Lab. He has authored or coauthored more than 200 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications on implantable microelectronic devices (IMD), integrated circuits and microsystems for IMD applications, and modern assistive and rehabilitation technologies. Dr. Ghovanloo was the general chair of the IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS 2015) in Atlanta, GA in Oct. 2015. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems. He served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part II (2008-2011), as well as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. He has also served on the Imagers, MEMS, Medical and Displays subcommittee of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) from 2009-2014. He has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Tommy Nobis Barrier Breaker Award for Innovation, and Distinguished Young Scholar Award from the Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage.
