Scott L. Delp, Ph.D.

Could potentially be used to help screen for disease risk, inform rehabilitation decisions and track improvements in motion following treatment.

A research team led by Scott L. Delp, Ph.D. of Stanford University and colleagues, and funded by the National Institutes of Health, has developed a smart phone app that can track and analyze a person’s locomotion and other types of movements.

Human motion analysis is used to evaluate patients with movement difficulties, to help clinicians plan surgery, and to assess the results of treatment procedures. The research team believes that using the app costs about 1% of conventional motion analysis techniques and works 25 times faster. The study appears in PLOS Computational Biology… Continue reading.

A computer simulation that relates muscle activation patterns to harmful pressure on the knee helps participants adopt knee-protective strategies as they walk.

Researchers at Stanford Medicine have discovered how to reduce force on the knee by teaching study participants to employ different muscles as they walk.

Using results from a detailed computer simulation, called a “digital human,” participants in a small study were able to reduce the load on their knees by an average of 12%, a benefit equivalent to a person losing about 20% of their total body weight. The lighter load may alleviate pain from osteoarthritis or prevent joint injuries… Continue reading.

Biochemist Peter Kim and bioengineer Scott Delp have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Delp was honored for his computer simulations of human movement and their applications to the treatment of clinical movement pathologies. Delp and his team have developed open-source software called OpenSim that allows scientists to create and analyze simulations of movement.

Delp recently launched the National Center for Mobility Data Integration to Insight, known as the Mobilize Center, which is a National Institutes of Health center of excellence for big data research.

The center makes use of the vast data available on movement in healthy people and in those with movement disorders and data generated through the proliferating wearable devices and phone apps that track movement, behaviors and health.

The mice in Scott Delp’s lab, unlike their human counterparts, can get pain relief from the glow of a yellow light.

Right now these mice are helping scientists to study pain – how and why it occurs and why some people feel it so intensely without any obvious injury. But Delp, a professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering, hopes one day the work he does with these mice can also help people who are in chronic, debilitating pain.

“This is an entirely new approach to study a huge public health issue,” Delp said. “It’s a completely new tool that is now available to neuroscientists everywhere.” He is the senior author of a research paper published Feb. 16 in Nature Biotechnology.

A SWITCH FOR PAIN

The mice are modified with gene therapy to have pain-sensing nerves that can be controlled by light. One color of light makes the mice more sensitive to pain. Another reduces pain. The scientists shone a light on the paws of mice through the Plexiglas bottom of the cage.

Graduate students Shrivats Iyer and Kate Montgomery, who led the study, say it opens the door to future experiments to understand the nature of pain and also touch and other sensations that are part of our daily lives but little understood.

“The fact that we can give a mouse an injection and two weeks later shine a light on its paw to change the way it senses pain is very powerful,” Iyer said.

For example, increasing or decreasing the sensation of pain in these mice could help scientists understand why pain seems to continue in people after an injury has healed. Does persistent pain change those nerves in some way? If so, how can they be changed back to a state where, in the absence of an injury, they stop sending searing messages of pain to the brain?