Joint BIOMED-Coulter Seminar
Dr. Jeffrey S. Barrett '86 Endowed Annual Lecture

Title:
Catalyzing Innovation To Improve Healthcare in Low Resource Settings
 
Speaker:
Steven E. Kern, PhD
Executive Director, Global Health (GH) Labs

Details:
Global Health Labs (www.ghlabs.org) innovates to co-create solutions that reduce health disparities, especially in low- and middle-income countries. As a nonprofit innovation lab fully funded by Gates Ventures (the private office of Bill Gates), we partner with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other cross-sector leaders to help develop health technology solutions with the people who need them most. Critical to success in this effort is a strong appreciation for the context into which the innovation is intended to work and constraints (technical, financial, cultural) that will affect its impact.

I will discuss how we develop an appreciation for this context and understand these constraints to bring ideas forward for addressing healthcare challenges in low resource settings using examples from our current portfolio of work that includes novel diagnostic tests and AI innovations.  

Biosketch:
To the role of Executive Director of Global Health Labs (GH Labs), Steve Kern brings a passion for global health technology innovation and nearly 40 years of cross-sector experience in pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling, clinical pharmacology, control systems engineering for drug delivery, and medical device development.  

Prior to GH Labs, Steve led the Quantitative Sciences Team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, providing quantitative analyses that shaped program strategies and therapeutic product development efforts in global health for nearly a decade. Before that, Steve was Global Head of Pharmacology Modeling at Novartis Pharma AG based in Basel, Switzerland, where his team provided model-based drug development support to therapeutics initiatives that spanned a range of disease conditions and all stages of product development. Earlier in his career, Steve also served as Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics, Anesthesiology, and Bioengineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he also served as co-investigator for their NIH funded Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit.  

Steve earned his PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Utah, MS in Bioengineering from Penn State University, and BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University.

BIOMED Master's Thesis Defense

Title:
Characterizing Aware and Unaware Vehicle Occupant Responses During Sled-Simulated Evasive Swerving: The Effect of Age and Maneuver Duration

Speaker:
Ken Berkery, Master's Candidate
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Drexel University
 
Advisor:
Valentina Graci, PhD
Assistant Research Professor
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Drexel University
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)

Details:
Objective: Previous studies showed that awareness reduced adult occupants’ out-of-position posture, but it is unclear if this finding can be extended to child occupants and time extended pre-crash maneuvers. This is important to be examined as, in highly automated vehicles, reduced awareness of impending maneuvers in all populations of occupants may influence restraint effectiveness. Therefore, we investigated the effect of awareness, age, and pre-crash maneuver duration on the motion and muscle activity of vehicle occupants during sled-simulated pre-crash evasive swerving maneuvers.

Methods: Forty seatbelt restrained subjects (9-40 years old) experienced a sled oscillatory perturbation (4 cycles, peak acceleration 0.7g) mimicking a series of swerving maneuvers under 2 conditions: an aware condition where subjects were instructed to brace before the maneuver onset, and an unaware condition, with no bracing instructions given. A 3D motion capture system, electromyography (EMG), and seatbelt load cells captured head and trunk kinematics, muscle activation, and seat belt reaction forces, respectively. Data were normalized by the subject seated height (Kinematics), the subject maximum voluntary isometric contraction (MVIC) (Muscle Activation), and the subject body weight (BW) (Seat Belt Reaction Forces). The effects of awareness, age, cycle, and interactions of those variables on peak lateral head and trunk displacement into and out-of-the belt were examined with a Mixed Effects Model and Tukey’s post-hoc tests (p≤0.05).

Results: In the aware condition, all subjects had reduced peak head and trunk displacements compared to the unaware condition (p<0.05). For the into the belt direction in the unaware condition, children showed the smallest peak head and trunk displacement of all age groups (p<0.01) while teens had the greatest peak head and trunk displacement compared to all other age groups (p<0.02). Similar trends were found in the out of the belt direction in the unaware condition, where children showed the smallest peak head and trunk displacement compared to adolescents and teens (p<0.01) but not adults (p > 0.05). Peak lateral head and trunk displacement was greatest in the first swerve out of the belt (p<0.01) and the smallest in the second swerve, regardless of age and awareness. In the unaware condition, all occupants showed greater shoulder seat belt reaction loads than the aware condition (unaware 1.6-2.7 N/kg, aware 1.0-1.4 N/kg). Children also showed greater neck muscle activation (50-64% MVIC) compared to other muscles and older occupants regardless of awareness condition or direction of motion.

Conclusion: Awareness reduced out-of-position postures in pre-crash vehicle maneuvers across all ages, including pediatric occupants. In the unaware condition, young children move less (normalized by seated height) than older teens and adults. This may be due to children using a different bracing strategy than older occupants as shown by the greater neck muscle activation. On the other hand, in the unaware condition, teens showed the greatest motion, potentially due to their developing neuromotor control transitioning to a more mature stage. Occupant responses changed over the maneuver duration, likely due to becoming more familiar with oscillatory motion throughout the cycles. Across all age groups in the unaware condition, occupants relied more heavily on the seat belt to maintain their position rather than relying on an active bracing strategy, particularly when moving out of the belt, suggesting the importance of good seatbelt-torso interaction in unaware occupants. Further investigation examining occupant awareness in various pre-crash maneuvers and seating configurations is warranted to understand how to protect unaware occupants in future vehicle and crash dynamics.

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