Daniel P Ferris
University of Florida, FL·Biomedical Engineering
Falls injure millions of people. They are common among people with limb loss, stroke, incomplete spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, and age-related decline.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Physiology
- Topics
balance training
fall prevention
falls
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2029
What they work on
- Test whether brief, intermittent visual occlusions during beam-walking balance training improve balance similarly in healthy younger and older adults.
- Determine whether visual occlusions shift the brain's reliance among vision, proprioception and inner-ear (vestibular) feedback in the posterior parietal cortex, using mobile high-density EEG recorded during walking.
- Compare visual perturbation timing settings, including occlusion length, clear-vision intervals and light dimming instead of full occlusion, to find which version gives the most effective balance training.
More about the research
Many kinds of balance training help, including strength training, Tai Chi, yoga and virtual reality games, but no single approach solves the problem. Recent research shows that briefly blocking a person's vision at intervals during balance practice can improve training results about four-fold, and the gains last longer. Why this works, and how best to deliver it, is not known.
Why it matters
Fall-related injuries reduce quality of life and longevity and raise health care costs for older adults and people with stroke, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis or limb loss. Identifying how and when brief visual blocking boosts balance training could lead to more effective fall-prevention therapies. It could also show which patient groups would benefit most.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tanvi Bhatt
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES), mild pulses that contract the quadriceps of the weaker leg, improves stability and limb support during 12 sessions of treadmill reactive balance training in people with moderate to severe chronic stroke.
Christopher D Harvey
Harvard University, MA·Neuroscience
Map effective connectivity among functionally identified neurons in the posterior parietal cortex during a virtual-reality navigation decision task, using cellular-resolution optogenetics to stimulate small groups of neurons and testing wiring motifs predicted by decision-making theories.
Najib Majaj
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Compare neural computations and behavioral algorithms in macaques foraging head-free in a foraging room with those during head-fixed navigation in virtual reality, to test whether restrained lab conditions differ from naturalistic ones.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
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