Clare Fitzpatrick
Boise State University, ID·Biomedical Engineering
Walking depends on many body systems working together. The brain and spinal cord send signals to muscles, muscles pull on bones and joints, and pain can change how a person moves.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Neuroscience
- Topics
biomechanics
musculoskeletal modeling
digital twin
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Build a multiscale computational model of the leg that links cortical and spinal control of muscles with muscle physiology, bone and joint mechanics, and the effects of pain on movement.
- Personalize the model for individual people using imaging and functional data from patients with osteoarthritis and patellofemoral pain (pain around the kneecap), so it reflects each person's anatomy and function.
- Use machine-learning surrogate models, fast approximations of the full simulation, to measure how sensitive walking and muscle loading are to a person's anatomy and neural factors.
- Predict how injury, disease and aging change the way people walk, and share the resulting software and datasets openly so others can reproduce the results.
More about the research
Aging, injury and disease take away mobility from millions of Americans. Yet most computer models of movement simulate only one of these systems at a time. As a result, they cannot fully explain why movement changes or predict how a treatment will help.
Why it matters
People losing mobility to osteoarthritis, knee pain, injury or aging could benefit if doctors and physical therapists can test options on a personalized computer model before choosing a treatment. The project expects its model to lead to machine-learning-assisted tools for tailoring rehabilitation plans to individuals. Its openly shared software and data could help other researchers reproduce and extend the work.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Juan Cui
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NE·Biomedical Engineering
Build a hybrid mechanistic and artificial-intelligence digital twin of skeletal muscle that predicts adaptation across different activity levels and metabolic states, organized around five interacting modules spanning mechanical loading, protein turnover, inflammation, regeneration and metabolism.
Lakshmi Nair
University of Connecticut, CT·Biomedical Engineering
Optimize where around the knee a new local anesthetic formulation is injected (periarticular placement), testing injection locations to find the one that gives the longest and strongest relief of osteoarthritis pain.
Aaron Young
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Compare personalized hip versus ankle exoskeleton assistance for improving walking on both legs after stroke, testing the hypothesis that hip assistance yields larger walking-speed gains because stroke survivors compensate at the hip for ankle weakness.
The school
Boise State University: 10 labs on PI Pages, $58M a year on research, 64 research doctorates a year.
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