Manoj Srinivasan Receives NSF CAREER Award to Study Human Locomotion

Assistant Professor Manoj Srinivasan's research proposal, titled "Towards An Optimization-Based and Experimentally Verified Predictive Theory of Human Locomotion," has earned support from the National Science Foundation's Early CAREER Development program.



According to Srinivasan, “the objective of his research is to obtain a sufficiently accurate, and broadly applicable, predictive theory of how people walk, run, and stabilize their movements. It is already possible to predict some aspects of human walking and running, by computing motions that minimize energy consumption. However, it is not known if such minimization can simultaneously predict the results of many different experiments, or the differences between different subjects, or how accurate such predictions could be in general.” As the principle investigator of the research, he will attempt to “reverse engineer” what quantity people are minimizing while moving  (if not energy), if indeed they are minimizing something. More specifically, “he will use 'inverse optimization’ to try to deduce a single objective function, perhaps loosely correlated with energy use, which, when minimized in the context of a computer model of the human-body, predicts the outcomes of many different human movement experiments.”

Results of his research may eventually enable the systematic model-based design of prosthetic and orthotic devices, and aide the diagnosis and treatment of movement pathologies, including possibly guiding surgical interventions.