BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

Dawn Taylor, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Office: Room 101 Wickenden Building Phone: (216) 368-2476 Fax: (216) 368-4872 Email: dxt42@case.edu Mail Address: Room 309 Wickenden Building 10900 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, OH 44106-7207
Selected links: • Department of Biomedical Engineering • Brain Machine Interfaces Lab >> • Cleveland FES Center >> • Neural Engineering Center >> • PubMed Citations >>

Research Summary

The long term goal of my research is to interface FES systems directly to the brain. Intended movement can be interpreted from the activity in the motor cortex, and we would like to use these signals to control FES systems. This would allow paralyzed individuals to move their limbs the same way everyone else does - just by thinking of doing so. I'm pursuing several parallel lines of research that will get us to that long-term goal.

I am investigating the use of both invasive and non-invasive brain recording techniques such as intracortical microelectrodes, brain surface recordings, and scalp surface recordings. These different types of brain signals are being applied to the control of a virtual arm representations of an arm as well as to the control of assistive robotics, and finally FES systems that restore arm and hand function to people with spinal cord injuries. One aspect of this work is to develop ways to utilize brain signals more effectively by retraining the brain to more accurately convey the desired action of the limb. This requires the development of appropriate training environments and adaptive decoding algorithms that can track changes in brain pattern generation over time. Direct brain control of both real and virtual arm and hand movements are being used to evaluate decoding algorithms and retraining methods. My work includes the use of rodent models of spinal cord injury, healthy non human primate models, and human subjects both with and without movement deficits.

Recent Publications