Title: Modelling Movement from Neural Activity to Function
Time: 14:00 to 17:00, Wednesday, July.26, 2023
Place: F210, School of Mechanical Engineering
Speaker: Dario Farina (Imperial College London)
Host: ZHU Xiangyang, Professor (Institute of Robotics)

Biography
Professor Farina has been Full Professor at Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark, (until 2010) and at the University Medical Center Göttingen, Georg-August University, Germany, where he founded and directed the Institute of Neurorehabilitation Systems (2010-2016) until he moved to Imperial College London as Chair in Neurorehabilitation Engineering. His research focuses on biomedical signal processing, neurorehabilitation technology, and neural control of movement. Within these areas, he has (co)-authored approximately 400 papers in peer-reviewed Journals. He has been the President of the International Society of Electrophysiology and Kinesiology (ISEK) (2012-2014) and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the official Journal of this Society, the Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology. He is also currently an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and the Journal of Physiology.

Abstract
Decoding movement from peripheral neural activities such as Electromyography (EMG) has been investigated in the past three decades, which has promising prospects in prosthetic control. Classic myoelectric control is mainly based on time/frequency domain handcrafted features extracted from EMG signals. EMG decomposition techniques can decode the motor unit action potential train (MUAPT), which directly represents the motor neuron activities in the spinal cord, and therefore has the potential to significantly improve the performance of myoelectric interfaces.