Keynote Lectures

New Technologies for Sports Analysis and High Performance Training
Luís Paulo Reis, University of Porto, Portugal, Portugal

Studying the Coordination Patterns in Human Motion - New Concepts for the Analysis of Movement
Peter Federolf, University of Innsbruck - Institute of Sport Science, Austria, Austria

Elastography for Muscle-tendon Biomechanics
Antoine Nordez, University of Nantes, France, France

Rehabilitation Robotics for the Lower Extremity - A Path for Success
Hermano Igo Krebs, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States, United States

New Technologies for Sports Analysis and High Performance Training

Luís Paulo Reis
University of Porto, Portugal
https://sigarra.up.pt/feup/en/func_geral.formview?p_codigo=211669

Brief Bio
Luis Paulo Reis is an Associate Professor with Habilitation at the University of Porto in Portugal and Director of LIACC – Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory. He is an IEEE Senior Member and he was president of the Portuguese Society for Robotics and of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is Co-Director of LIACD - First Degree in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. During the last 25 years, he has lectured courses at the university on Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Robotics, Multi-Agent Systems, Simulation and Modelling, Games and Interaction, Educational/Serious Games and Computer Programming. He was the principal investigator of more than 20 research projects in those areas. He won more than 60 scientific awards including winning more than 15 RoboCup international competitions (including the last 3 editions of the Simulation 3D League - Humanoid Robots) and best papers at conferences such as ICEIS, Robotica, IEEE ICARSC and ICAART. He supervised 25 PhD and 180 MSc theses to completion and is supervising 12 PhD theses. He evaluated more than 50 projects and proposals for FP6, FP7, Horizon2020/Europe, FCT, and ANI. He was a plenary speaker at several international conferences, such as ICAART, ICINCO, LARS/SBR, WAF, IcSports, SYROCO, CLAWAR, WCQR, ECIAIR, DATA/DELTA, IC3K and ICMarkTech. He organized more than 70 international scientific events and belonged to the program committee of more than 300 scientific events. He is the author of more than 500 publications in international conferences and journals.

Abstract

Sports are becoming more and more technological. Engineering in general and Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Simulation in particular are becoming an important and almost essential support for many activities directly or indirectly related to sport sciences with emphasis on high performance sports training. In this growing world of high performance sports, elite coaches and sport stars are increasingly entering into the new innovation and technological world to advance performance and gain competitive advantages. This talk will analyze the current state of the art on Sports Analysis and High Performance Training and overview recent projects on these areas. The talk will also present research work and recent advances developed at our laboratory in the area of collective sports analysis, player models and team models creation and extraction and collective sports simulation. Our work has been targeting on creating high-level realistic simulators based on realistic player models in order to enable elite coaches to test and fine tune game strategies for distinct sports both indoor and outdoor.

Studying the Coordination Patterns in Human Motion - New Concepts for the Analysis of Movement

Peter Federolf
University of Innsbruck - Institute of Sport Science, Austria

Brief Bio

Dr. Peter Federolf is a Professor for Biomechanics at Department of Neuroscience in the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway and an Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian School for Sport Sciences (NIH) in Oslo, Norway. In 2000 he received a degree in Physics and in 2005 his ph.d. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Dr. Federolf held postdoctoral positions at the University of Salzburg, Austria and at the University of Calgary, Canada. He has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Calgary from 2007 to 2011. His research interests focus on the development of new concepts for the understanding of human motion and the advancement of methods for its analysis.

Abstract
Coordination of the body segments is one of the most fundamental skills facilitating human motion. Only through successful coordination of the movements of all body segments it is possible to create, to transfer, and to counterbalance the forces that are necessary for executing a movement task. This talk will discuss principal component analysis (PCA) as one method to quantify and investigate coordination patterns in human motion. Effective application of PCA depends on an understanding of the various sources that create variability in human motion data. The talk will therefore also discuss such sources and suggest methods that can be used to reduce detrimental effects of unwanted variability in the analysis. Various application examples for PCA will be presented including clinical gait research, performance analysis in sports, or sports engineering research.

Elastography for Muscle-tendon Biomechanics

Antoine Nordez
University of Nantes, France

Brief Bio
Dr Antoine Nordez is associate professor at the Sport Sciences department of the University of Nantes (France), and in the laboratory "Movement, Interactions, Performance". He has a background in mechanical engineering and a PhD in biomechanics (2006 at the University of Nantes). he held a post-doctoral position in the "Laboratoire de Biomécanique" at the "Arts et Métiers ParisTech" in Paris (2006-2007). He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in the field of muscle-tendon biomechanics.

Abstract
The lecture will be focused on the characterization muscle-tendon mechanical properties using elastography. A brief review will present elastographic methods and indicate advantages of each. Since it provides an instantaneous measurement, an ultrasound method based on the shear wave velocity measurement called Supersonic Shear Imaging (SSI) seems very promising for the study of muscle. It was shown that this technique provides an accurate estimation of individual muscle force in passive (i.e., stretching) and active (i.e., contractions) conditions. Recent studies that aim to study coordination during isometric contraction and changes in passive muscle tension using this technique will be reviewed. Perspectives for the study of dynamic contractions will also be briefly presented.

Rehabilitation Robotics for the Lower Extremity - A Path for Success

Hermano Igo Krebs
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

Brief Bio
Hermano Igo Krebs joined MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department in 1997 where he is a Principal Research Scientist – Newman Laboratory for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation. He also holds an affiliate position as an Adjunct Professor at University of Maryland School of Medicine, Department of Neurology and the Division of Rehabilitative Medicine. He is one of the founders of Interactive Motion Technologies, a start-up developing robotics for rehabilitation and one of the pioneers of rehabilitation robotics. His goal is to revolutionize rehabilitation medicine by applying robotics to assist, enhance, and quantify rehabilitation. His efforts led to the American Heart Association to endorse in its 2010 guidelines for stroke care the use of robots for upper extremity rehabilitation. Similar endorsement was issued by the Veterans Administration later in that same year.

Abstract

Robotic therapy is a flagship example of the benefits of human-robot collaboration. However the 2010 American Heart Association guidelines for stroke care only endorsed robotic therapy for the upper extremity (UE), and not for the lower extremity (LE). In 2010, the US Veterans Administration similarly endorsed robotic therapy for UE but not for LE: “recommendation is made against routinely providing the [LE] intervention… At least fair evidence was found that the intervention is ineffective …” This apparent immaturity of LE robotic therapy reflects the fact that, to date, knowledge of human motor control has not been applied to LE robotic therapy. Knowledge of human motor control, sensing, and cognition has matured to the point that a fundamental theory of walking is now within reach. Walking can be composed of elementary actions, specifically submovements, oscillations, and mechanical impedance. This talk will discuss a proposal for a competent model of walking based on these elementary actions and code it into adaptive controllers that will allow multiple robotic devices to target human-like walking and rehabilitation.