Department Seminar of Dana Solev- Patient-Specific Weight-Bearing Assistive Gait Devices: Data-Driven Design and Analysis
Patient-Specific Weight-Bearing Assistive Gait Devices: Data-Driven Design and Analysis
Monday November 25th at 14:00
Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206
Abstract:
Various weight-bearing assistive gait devices, such as lower-limb prosthetics and orthotics, require a tailored patient-specific design. This is crucial for ensuring proper mechanical interaction with soft tissues and facilitating functionality. However, the conventional methods for custom design are largely artisanal, non-standard, and insufficiently data-driven. Therefore, there is a clear need for computational design frameworks that are automatic, repeatable, data-driven, and based on scientific rationale. These frameworks typically utilize imaging techniques, sensors, and numerical simulations such as finite element analysis (FEA), to drive patient-specific design.
This talk will cover two research projects aimed at advancing the development of these frameworks. The first project concerns the development of a new type of ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) for walking with adjustable ankle-foot offloading. This AFO aims to facilitate a symmetric and natural gait pattern while precisely adjusting the amount of load transferred to the injured foot and ankle during gait. It incorporates a patient-specific load-bearing shank brace, and ground contact plates based on a statistical analysis of ankle-foot roll-over shape. The second project focuses on estimating the material parameters of soft tissues used in FEA simulations for design algorithms. Accurate constitutive modelling and parameter estimation are crucial for reliable FEA results. However, it is challenging to identify these parameters in vivo, and uncertainties can propagate into the simulated results. We will discuss methods to improve the identifiability of material parameters that capture the complex mechanical responses of soft tissues, using multi-modal indentation tests.
Bio:
Dr. Solav holds a BSc in Geophysics from Tel-Aviv University (2006) and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (2016). In 2017 she joined the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group as a postdoc, where she became a research scientist (2019) to lead the group’s computational biomechanics research track. In 2020, Dr. Solav joined the Technion’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering as an Assistant Professor, where she currently directs the Biomechanical Interfaces Group. Her research focuses on the biomechanical interface between the human body and biomedical devices such as prosthetics and orthotics, with an emphasis on developing and optimizing patient-specific devices that improve patient comfort, health, and function. To achieve this, Dr. Solav’s group analyzes the biomechanical factors that affect human movement and function, develops new imaging and measurement tools, and combines them with advanced computational algorithms, experimental procedures, and fabrication methods.
