KINEMATICS LAB @ the DCNU
Overview
Infants with white matter damage display atypical
motor development that results in reduced opportunity for exploration
and environmental interaction, which in turn, delays their cognitive and
motor development. We seek to combine motion capture and dynamical
systems analysis to develop a quantitative assessment of these anomalous
trajectories and provide the basis for (a) an earlier and more accurate
diagnosis, (b) the design of a novel intervention, when the brain is at
its most adaptable, and (c) a method to detect and validate any changes
resulting from intervention.
Our focus is on
early movements (2 to 4 months), when activity is exploratory in nature.
We seek to formally describe motor synergies on the basis of both
kinematic and physiological information. Our aim is to design and trial
novel interventions that can be applied during waking hours and enable
them to practise a greater repertoire of movements, thus potentially
improving their motor outcomes. This intervention will be started when
the developing nervous system is thought to be most adaptable and normal
development of cortical and spinal reflex pathways can be facilitated.
Healthy babies needed!
We are looking for healthy babies to help us build a picture of typical development. If you have a baby aged 1-6 months, please do consider helping us!
People
Luc Berthouze
Luc
received his Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from the University of Evry
(France) in 1996. After working for 5 years at the Electrotechnical
Laboratory (ETL) of Japan, he joined the Neuroscience Research Institute
of AIST, Japan, first as a research scientist and from 2005 as a senior
research scientist.
He is currently a senior lecturer in the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex, and a honorary senior lecturer at the UCL Institute of Child Health.
His research is concerned with the computational modelling of adaptive and developmental mechanisms, particularly in motor development. Specifically, he is interested in the dynamics of exploratory movements in young infants and how it is affected by neurological conditions such as CP (with Margaret Mayston) as well as in the origin and functional relevance of developmental changes in neuronal coherence (with Simon Farmer).
Selected
publications
- Berthouze L, Goldfield EG (2008) Assembly, tuning, and transfer of action systems in infants and robots. Infant and Child Development 17: 25-42.
- Berthouze L, Tijsseling A (2006) A neural model for context-dependent sequence learning. Neural Processing Letters 23: 27-45.
- Berthouze L, Lungarella M (2004) Motor skill acquisition under environmental perturbations: On the necessity of alternate freezing and freeing of degrees of freedom. Adaptive Behavior 12: 47-64.
- Lungarella M, Berthouze L (2002) On the interplay between morphological, neural and environmental dynamics. Adaptive Behavior 10: 223-241
Babies needed!
Volunteering your baby for a movement recording session
We
are looking for healthy babies between the ages of 1-6
months. Your baby will take part in one 30 minute session
in which s/he will be asked to lie on his/her back and play while
his/her movements are recorded by cameras which track several reflective
markers which are placed on the body. Muscle activity will also be
measured using stickers attached to the skin overlying some of the
muscles. The equipment is non invasive, does not stimulate the baby, and
will not cause pain or discomfort. The recording itself is very short,
usually made over multiple short sessions of 1 minute and you can hold
your baby in between these short sessions if you would like to. What do
you gain? As the lucky parent of a healthy baby, you do not really gain
anything, except the knowledge that you have helped contribute to
scientific research and to the improvement of treatments for children
with brain lesions and movement difficulties. Although we are not
allowed to pay you for your time, your travel expenses will be covered.
How to Volunteer
Please complete the following
form or contact Serife Dervish on 020 7905 2746 and we will get
back to you shortly!
Page last modified on 23 apr 13 17:28
