News and Updates

Mahsa Khalili was awarded top presenter at the UBC Faculty of Medicine’s Building the Future – Research Trainee Day 2025 for her presentation entitled Detecting Real World Cardiac Arrest using Wearable Sensors. Congratulations Mahsa!

Mona Behrouzian was recently awarded a Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s (CGSM) for her proposal entitled How Do Adolescents Move? Quantifying Adolescent Movement Variability Using Principal Component Analysis for Insights into Coordinated Movement Patterns. This award will aid in further developments in return to sport kinematic analysis for adolescents. Below is a description of the award-winning submission. The whole lab is so proud of Mona!

Movement is fundamental to how we explore, communicate, and engage with the world. It shapes our interactions, enables our ambitions, and connects us to our environment. Yet, we rarely consider the intricate mechanics that make it possible, or how those mechanics vary between individuals. Adolescents, in particular, experience rapid physical and physiological changes that amplify variability in movement, influenced by factors such as sex, age, and developmental heterogeneity. This natural variability complicates efforts to assess what constitutes normal versus abnormal movement—a critical distinction for understanding injury risk, biomechanical development, and overall physical health. My research addresses these challenges by applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to biomechanical data collected during functional activities such as walking, running, jumping, and side-stepping. PCA captures the continuous and coordinated nature of movement, identifying key patterns of inter-joint coordination that reflect the interaction of joints and body segments. This innovative approach provides a holistic view of movement variability and highlights how biological factors, such as sex and age, influence these patterns. The insights gained will establish a framework for understanding normal adolescent movement variability, paving the way for future research into movement abnormalities related to injury, developmental differences, or other health conditions. By advancing our ability to assess complex movement patterns, this work will contribute to improving biomechanical assessments, enhancing injury prevention strategies, and deepening our understanding of human motion.

Mona Behrouzian was recently awarded first place in the UBC-wide 3MT competition for her presentation entitled Young Athletes, Big Decisions: Data-Driven Knee Injury Risk Screening. She will be representing UBC at the Western regionals on May 6th at the University of Victoria. Congratulations!

Vishak Nandan Aathresh took home first place in the SBME Propels pitch competition this past Thursday for his innovation called ‘TubeCheck,” and Genevieve Bonnor and Mona Behrouzian took second for their innovation “IncuSaver.” Congratulations to both teams, and best of luck in developing these ideas further!

Mona Behrouzian and Mona Pei, both HuMBL Master’s students, were awarded 2nd and 3rd place, respectively, in the School of Biomedical Engineering’s 3MT heat. Behrouzian’s talk was titled Young Athletes, Big Decisions: Data-Driven Knee Injury Risk Screening, while Pei’s talk was titled Breast motion causing pain when moving? Motion sensors to characterize breast motions. Behrouzian will proceed to the UBC semi-finals on March 11th.

Dr. Calvin Kuo, alongside co-PI Jacqueline Whittacker, was awarded a CIHR priority announcement this past week for his work entitled Understanding Differences in Exposure to and Biomechanical Features of ‘Risky’ Movements between Female and Male Athletes in Soccer. Below is a description of the fully funded project. For more details, please visit this link.

Injuries remain a large component of sport participation. Each sport comes with its unique set of injuries due to exposure to particular movements that put athletes at risk. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world with injuries in the legs being most common. Many common injuries, such as ankle sprains, hamstring muscle strains, and knee Anterior Cruciate Ligament tears, are non-contact injuries that occur without any interaction with other athletes. Instead, these injuries are often associated with maneuvers such as cutting when moving around the field (ankle and knee injuries) or through over-exertion (hamstring injuries). Recently, we have developed a wearable movement sensor to both monitor soccer play and measure specific movements that are most associated with injury. Here, we propose to first train a machine learning classification algorithm to determine when athletes are performing ‘risky’ movements in soccer. Then, we will deploy the wearable sensor to female and male soccer athletes over the soccer season to track how often they perform ‘risky’ movements as a measure of exposure to these potentially dangerous movements. We expect female and male athletes will exhibit different exposure to different types of ‘risky’ movements associated with the injuries that are more common in the respective sex. We also expect athletes will perform ‘risky’ movements more often and with greater intensity (as measured by the sensors) over a season. This information can help link injury with mechanistic factors such as fatigue or training, which can in turn help develop preventative training to reduce injury risk. Through this study, we will have applied our wearable movement sensor to understand the evolution of ‘risky’ movement exposure over a season and how female and male athletes are differentially exposed to ‘risky’ movements. Ultimately, this will help us understand differences in female and male athlete play and its potential role in injury risk.

Dr. Calvin Kuo, alongside co-PIs Tim Bhatnagar and Lise Leveille, was awarded a CIHR project grant this past week for his work entitled Assessing Remote Technologies for Return to Sport after Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury in Children. Below is a description of the fully funded project. For more details, visit this link.

Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) injuries are a common and debilitating injury in children who participate in sport. These injuries are known to increase the risk of osteoarthritis and future re-injury and in severe cases, require surgical reconstruction and months of rehabilitation before returning to daily activities and sport. To mitigate the chance of future re-injury and ensure a safe return to mobility for both school and sport, children are usually assessed over a range of common movements by a doctor after recovery. But, because each child, each injury, and each recovery are different, performance on standardized movement assessments can vary considerably. To improve the process of return to sport decisions, we propose to quantify and characterize the differences in movement ability between healthy children and those at 9 months following ACL reconstruction surgery. This will inform us on the expected variations within standardized assessments. Because return to sport assessments occur only once at 9 months post-surgery, we also propose to evaluate state-of-the-art deep learning methods that will ultimately help track recovery in the home using camera videos of movement assessments. Such technologies have been utilized in adults to track movement recovery and rehabilitation but have not been effectively evaluated or translated to children, despite the high incidence of injuries and their debilitating consequences. These tools will provide a more complete picture of the recovery process, and in the future will allow clinicians and physiotherapists to personalize treatment during the recovery period. Overall, this work seeks to better understand how to make return to sport decisions following an ACL injury to provide children the best chance of a full recovery without re-injury and further complications.

Genevieve Bonnor, a HuMBL Master’s student was awarded the SBME Outreach Award this past week for her work in outreach of SBME and biomedical engineering. The award will help support further outreach in the future.

Dr. Mahsa Khalili has been awarded the CANTRAIN-Michael Smith Health Research BC (MSHRBC) Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project titled “Multi-Modal Wearables with Machine Learning Algorithms for Continuous Cardiac Monitoring: Implications for Timely Detection of Sudden Cardiac Arrest.” The project focuses on the development and validation of wearable sensor systems aimed at detecting sudden cardiac arrest. For more details, please visit the MSHRBC webpage.

Mona Behrouzian, a HuMBL Master’s student, was awarded the best presenter award at BC Children’s Hospital’s Evidence to Innovation (E2i) Forum. This award will be used to support conference travel.

Dr. Calvin Kuo gave a keynote speech at the 2024 SBME Research Day titled: “Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Wearable Health Monitoring”. For more details, please visit the SBME webpage.

HuMBL was represented well at BMES this week by Fraser Douglas, Saud Lingawi, Shealie Lock and Asande (Rael) Gumbe! Pictures can be found on the main page of our website, and conference publications can be found on our publications page. Congratulations on attending!

Mona Behrouzian, a HuMBL Master’s student, was awarded the Patrick David Campbell Graduate Fellowship for her work on pediatric athletes returning to sport after anterior cruciate ligament injuries. The fellowship, part of the University of British Columbia’s Affiliated Awards, will help support further research into the field.

Fraser Douglas, a HuMBL PhD student, was awarded a EPIC-AT Fellowship this month for his work that utilizes high-density electromyography (EMG) arrays for the purpose of quantifying recovery from stroke. The fellowship is accompanied by a training program that helps hone the skills of graduate students and trainee researchers, providing internships, education and mentorship to recipients.

Genevieve Bonnor, a HuMBL Master’s student was awarded a Cordula and Gunter Paetzold Fellowship this past week for her work on creating an algorithm to mitigate soft tissue artifacts. The fellowship, part of the University of British Columbia’s Affiliated Awards, will help support further research into the field.

The upcoming issue of the Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians (JACEP) will feature a paper authored by HuMBL PhD student, Saud Lingawi. The paper, titled “Wearable devices for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: A population survey on the willingness to adhere”, aimed to identify people’s preferred type of wearable and examined the willingness of Canadians to wear devices for the purpose of detecting sudden cardiac arrest. Contributing authors include HuMBL’s Dr. Mahsa Khalili and Dr. Calvin Kuo. You can read it here!