Description:
Online public lecture by William Holderbaum, Professor in Control Engineering in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Aston University.
Lecture overview:
According to statistics from charities such as Every Eight Hours and Spinal Research, there are an estimated 40,000 spinal cord injured (SCI) people in the UK and a new person is injured every eight hours. Spinal cord injury results in an interruption of the neurological pathway from the brain to muscles and sense organs. A complete lesion of the spinal cord at thoracic level results in paralysis of the lower limbs and the loss of voluntary control of the bladder and bowel.
In this talk, Professor Holderbaum will describe a range of research and development activities aimed at providing practical assistive systems for people who have suffered spinal cord injury (SCI). He will also explain the principles behind the technique known as functional electrical stimulation (FES), in which stimulation of paralysed muscles can generate muscle contraction.
Professor Holderbaum will focus primarily on the development of FES systems for lower limb function carried out by us. The aim here is to restore some normal motor activities to the muscles, including standing, standing up and sitting down, stepping, and cycling. Several studies have shown that regular use of lower-limb FES systems by SCI patients can provide a number of important therapeutic benefits and improved fitness.
Speaker Biography:
William is a Professor in Control Engineering in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Aston University.
He was awarded a Ph.D degree on Automatic Control with PhD thesis on developing new methodology to design control laws for hybrid systems. He was a research assistant at the University of Glasgow, then appointed Lecturer in Electronics Engineering at the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading in October 2001, Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Engineering in 2009 and Professor in Mathematics and Engineering in 2014. Before joining Aston, William was Professor in Control Engineering at the Manchester Metropolitan University.
He has been involved in research with mathematical modeling and control theory with applications mainly to health, energy, and robotics. In particular Rehabilitation Engineering, Smart Grid, Power Generation, Wireless Power Transfer, Autonomous Vehicle, Motion planning, visualisation control. Willam has published over 100 papers in leading journals and international conferences.