Announcements

• SfN - October 17-29
• Look at other funding sources
• Get a budget ($220 plane ticket)
• Banff - November 8-13
• Look at getting plane tickets
• Look at Torrence's papers due by next week
• Find the Vicon Key
• Need to make an assesment on data storage
• BUGGS is doing a carnival tomorrow.
• Adobe CS 4 - be on the look-out.
  

Presentation

Julia

• How does the nervous system affect the movement of the body?
• Now try and look at how the mechanics of the body affect the nervous system!
• How does stance width affect balance control?
• Relevance: Parkinson's patients have a much narrower stance.
• Do initial biomechanical conditions affect postural responses to maintain stability?
• CoM is tightly controlled, because excursion is the same between narrow and wide stance (Henry et al 2000).
• EMGs do not scale between stance widths for Parkinson patients.
• Parkinson patients apply the same level of force for different stance widths
• For Jeven's standard figure plot stiffness in a more readable format
• Do feedback gains change between different stance configurations?
• A prediction is that stance width will change the gains.
• The EMG activity in TFL goes down with increasing stance width.
• Peak CoM velocity and acceleration goes down with increasing stance width
• Hypothesis: Balance control in standing can be modeled as feedback control of the CoM motion where the gains related to acceleration and velocity changes with initial biomechanical conditions (stance width).
• Explicit model vs abstract model - both should ultimately lead to a similar result.