Dr. Rory J. O’Connor
Professor
Head of the Academic Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Leeds
Director of Research and Innovation Leeds Institute of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Medicine

ABSTRACT
Robotic devices and machine learning have great potential to enhance patients' rehabilitation, encourage independence and promote dignity. However, adoption of these technologies into clinical practice has been slow. This lecture will present various factors influencing adoption, with particular reference to upper and lower limb rehabilitation systems.

From the patient's perspective, the considerations should include the value patients and carers place in rehabilitation and assistive technology. In this regard, various factors influence determine patient uptake, including co-design, cost and difficulty of use.

Healthcare professionals need to clearly state which clinical factors should influence robotic treatment in individual patients and how robotic treatment could be aligned to patients’ goals. Consideration should be given to what extent clinicians should directly set treatment parameters.

Device developers should consider what barriers may be encountered when introducing these technologies into clinical practice and how might barriers be reduced through design.

Finally, all actors should determine how the progress and outcome of treatment should be monitored within the multidisciplinary team.

I will draw up on our experience of inpatient and home-based treatment rehabilitation and assistive devices and systems developed in our laboratories and present a framework for matching rehabilitation and assistive technologies to patients’ needs.

Dr. Yong Chen
Professor
Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California

ABSTRACT
Additive manufacturing (AM) technology has seen significant developments, expanding its impact across various sectors due to its unique ability to directly convert a computer-aided design model into a physical object. Vat photopolymerization (VPP, aka Stereolithography) has been a popular additive manufacturing (AM) technique for creating high-resolution, smooth surface finish, and complex 3D structures. Recent advances in VPP technology have enabled higher resolution, faster print speeds, and improved material properties, expanding the range of applications for this technology. In this talk, I will discuss recent developments in our lab that enable multi-scale, multi-material, and multi-functional additive manufacturing processes to fabricate smart sensors and actuators for mechatronics systems. These improvements have opened up the possibility of creating new functional materials with various unique design properties. I will report some of our recent work to showcase the design and fabrication of devices with integrated mechanical, optics, acoustic, fluidic, and thermal properties enabled by these advances. The talk will conclude with remarks and thoughts on future AM developments and potential opportunities for mechatronics engineers.

Dr. Zeng-Guang Hou
Professor
Deputy director of State Key Laboratory of Management & Control for Complex Systems
Professor，Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing
PI of the CEBSIT of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)

ABSTRACT
Rehabilitation is useful for people who due to neural system damages have lost motor or cognitive abilities that they need for daily life. Rehabilitation robots are providing new means for functional rehabilitation of those patients, and there are growing demands in hospitals, communities and families. However, the robots for assistive rehabilitation training face many scientific and technical challenges. For example, efficient, reliable, safe and human in the loop control is an important difficulty preventing their practical applications. In this talk, we will discuss some experimental and clinical attempts and paradigm, on acquisition and processing of multi-modal bio-signals, brain-computer- interface based intelligent interaction and human in the loop control methods for rehabilitation robots, and also prospects for the future development.

Dr. Peter Xu
Professor
Chair in Mechatronics Engineering, University of Auckland
Senior Member of IEEE and Fellow of Engineering New Zealand

ABSTRACT
Prof Xu will describe the fundamental challenges and opportunities in the emerging field of soft robotics, with focus on the robots his lab has developed to perform in vitro bio-mimic simulations of human digestion processes. He will present how soft robotic esophagus, stomach and tongue are specified, designed and developed, and showcase their real-life applications such as esophageal stent migration and pharmaceutical drug testing.