Event
BIOE Seminar: Turning towards understanding and improving agile human maneuvers
Friday, October 6, 2023
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
A. James Clark Hall, Room #2121
Katharina Maisel
maiselka@umd.edu
Dr. Antonia Zaferiou
Stevens Institute of Technology
Assistant Professor
Turning towards understanding and improving agile human maneuvers
Abstract
Up to half of the steps taken during walking outside of a laboratory are not part of straight-line gait, and turns are especially common. The ability to perform agile maneuvers like turns is a fundamental skill that challenges balance as we navigate our environment or swiftly perform athletic maneuvers. While some balance-impaired populations struggle to turn, at the other end of the spectrum, the elite performance of athletes and dancers often relies on their abilities to turn with ease. This talk will introduce overarching turning mechanics and how athletes, young, and older adults generate and control the requisite momenta during different types of turns. The presentation will also introduce how generating rotational momenta can present conflicts with balance maintenance and the recent development of music-based biofeedback towards improving older adult balance during turns.
Speaker Bio
Antonia Zaferiou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research strives to improve and preserve human mobility through two main themes: (1) by understanding how people mechanically accomplish turns that are ubiquitous in daily life and athletic endeavors and (2) by developing and evaluating sound and music-based biofeedback to improve movement mechanics. Her rehabilitation-related research is supported by an NSF CAREER award and she was a recipient of an Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Engineering Research Career Development (IRE-K12) award. Additionally, with support from a Major League Baseball research grant, her team is discovering the mechanics behind how pitchers generate ball speed.
Dr. Zaferiou 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.
