Ou Bai

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Florida International University

Presentation title: Wearable Sensing of Motor Preceding Activity for FoG Prediction

Abstract:

Parkinson's Disease (PD) affects over 1% of the population over 60 years of age and is expected to reach 1 million in the USA by the year 2020, growing by 60 thousand each year. It is well understood that PD is characterized by dopaminergic loss, leading to decreased executive function causing motor symptoms such as tremors, bradykinesia, dyskinesia, and freezing of gait (FoG). Due to widely heterogeneous among PD patients, understanding the patient subsets and the neural biomarkers that set them apart will lead to improved personalized care. To explore the physiological alternations caused by PD on neurological pathways and their effect on motor control, it is necessary to detect the neural activity and its dissociation with healthy physiological function. To this effect, this study presents a custom ultra-wearable sensor solution, consisting of electroencephalograph, electromyograph, ground reaction force, and symptom measurement sensors for the exploration of neural biomarkers during active gait paradigms. Furthermore, for reliable real-time FoG prediction before the event occurs, we have designed high-performance multimodal sensor fusion and machine-learning algorithms to improve the accuracy, efficiency, scalability, and robustness of FoG prediction models. 

Biography:

Dr. Bai received his B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and received his Ph.D. Degree in the Advanced Systems Control Engineering from Saga University in Saga, Japan. He received post-doctoral research training at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Bai has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University and he currently serves as the Director of Human Cyber-Physical Systems Laboratory and Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Florida International University. Dr. Bai serves as the Director of Human Cyber-Physical Systems (HCPS) Laboratory in FIU. He leads the HCPS Lab to develop new sensor, network and computing technologies to accelerate both the creation and our understanding of the complex and increasingly coupled relationships between humans and computing with the broad goal of advancing human capabilities. Dr. Bai has successfully developed a number of Intent-of-Things (IoT) applications that may promote better human interactions with physical world, such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), neuro prosthetics, and human-robot interactions. Dr. Bai has published more than 100 Journal papers and conference proceedings. He is member of IEEE EMBS society.