UBC Vancouver’s School of Kinesiology and UBC Okanagan’s School of Health and Exercise Sciences present the UBC Exercise, Kinesiology and Health Seminar Program. The seminar program is a forum for critical academic discussion between students and faculty members from all disciplines.
The series is designed to expand knowledge about topics from the broad field of kinesiology and health studies for graduate students and faculty members. All visitors are welcome to attend the virtual series.
Dr. Calvin Kuo
Measuring Human Motion in the Wild.
Calvin Kuo is a new assistant professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering heading the human motion biomechanics laboratory (HuMBL: http://humbl.bme.ubc.ca/) based out of the Centre for Hip Health and Mobility at the Vancouver General Hospital. His work focuses on the use of wearable inertial measurement unit sensors to study human motion in natural real-world environments. In particular, he is interested in quantifying the biomechanics of impacts in order to study mechanisms of injury such as anterior cruciate ligament tears or mild traumatic brain injuries, and also study how humans respond to and recover from sudden movement perturbations.
His lab also studies how the brain utilizes its own biological inertial measurement unit sensors, the vestibular organs located in the inner ear, to perceive its own movements in space.
Here, he employs statistical models to understand how sensory afferent neurons encode uncertainty and how the brain interprets noisy information to form sometimes illusory perceptions. As a member of SBME, he also works directly with clinicians to develop tools to automatically assess human movement for clinical or diagnostic purposes. As an example, he is currently working with members of the BC Children’s hospital to automatically identify abnormal movement behaviors indicative of psychological disorders in videos of children. While the lab’s research covers different topics, the theme of the research lies in the study of human movement. Prior to his position at UBC, Calvin obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and was a Killam postdoctoral fellow under Jean-Sebastien Blouin in Kinesiology and Dinesh Pai in Computer Science at UBC.
For more details about the seminar series, Click Here.
Zoom Registration link: Click Here.