Loading Events

MEAM Seminar: “Predicting Infant Center of Pressure through Physics and Data Driven Modeling”

August 12, 2025 at 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
Details
Date: August 12, 2025
Time: 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
Event Category: SeminarDoctoral
  • Event Tags:,
  • Organizer
    Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics
    Phone: 215-746-1818
    Venue
    Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street
    Philadelphia
    PA 19104
    Google Map

    Affecting roughly 2 in 1000 infants in the USA, Cerebral Palsy (CP) is the most common cause of motor impairment in children. CP has no cure, but motor therapy is an effective tool for providing rehabilitation. Although therapy is most effective before the age of 2, early CP detection is difficult and labor-intensive, making the processes inaccessible in low-resource settings. To remedy this inaccessibility, we seek to create an accessible technology-based tool to make detecting neuromotor impairment in infants less easier. Studies have shown promising results in quantifying infant impairment by observing changes in the Center of Pressure (COP), as they lie supine. Although a useful metric, the force plates necessary to capture COP are often not readily accessible in low-resource settings due to factors such as high price and a lack of portability. In response, my goal is to make COP easier to obtain by predicting supine infant COP through human pose data gathered with cameras. I seek to derive a generalized physics-based model of the infant’s dynamics that calculates COP based on insights gained from examining how infant movement interacts with changes in COP. I will then use this physics-based model to improve the ability to use machine learning to derive COP from only camera information. As a result, I will create a novel framework involving the use of physics-based modeling and data-driven modeling to predict COP.