Presenter - MASc candidate Arshak Petrosyan (supervised by Dr. James Tung)
Title
Advancing Methods for Kinematic Analysis of Martial Arts-Based Falling Techniques
Abstract
Older adults are at a high risk of falls which can result in serious injury. Rotation during the fall onto the side or back is a protective response used by older adults which mimics strategies used in judo, a combat sport where safe falling is an integral part of training. Analysis of expert falling technique in judo can be used as a model to build an effective intervention protocol for at-risk older adults. While common methods of analysis use reflective marker technology, the goal of this project is to compare the falls of experts and novices using markerless motion capture technology instead, resulting in improved ecological validity and shorter, simpler data collections.
Presenter - PhD candidate Claire Thompson (supervised by Dr. Stewart McLachlin)
Title
In-vitro characterization of Intervertebral load transfer with multi-level posterior fixation
Abstract
In-vitro spinal biomechanical testing is needed to provide better pre-clinical experimental testing of spinal implants to characterize device efficacy and increase patient satisfaction. A main gap in this type of testing is directly measuring the associated loads within the spinal column. This is specifically important as the phenomenon of adjacent segment disease is hypothesized to be due to increased loading in the spinal segment above and below the terminal levels of fixation, especially in the lumbo-sacral region (L5/S1). Previous work has captured in-vivo loads with telemeterized implants or custom in-vitro strain gauges in spinal specimens, though these methods are invasive and difficult to reproduce. The overarching goal of this research is to use a commercially available 6DOF load cell to directly measure the loads in the L5/S1 disc space as the number of posterior fixation levels is increased.
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