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Research
Injury due to falls is the 2nd leading cause of injury in Canada and directly accounts for 2 billion dollars in medical spending. Many of these falls could prevented though the use of walking aids. Walking aids such as canes or walkers are effective balance aids, though they are often prescribed after an injury rather than before. Current balance diagnostic tests are not able to identify people who are mobile, but at risk of falling and injuring themselves.
My main research focus is on developing and validating the controls theory and methods that explain how humans walk and balance. The vast majority of my work thus far has focused on understanding how foot placement location can be used to balance a biped. My hope is that a rigourous mathematical understanding of these processes will help develop effective balance assessment tests.
Areas of Study:
- Biomechanics
- Kinematics and Dynamics of Multibody Systems
- Nonlinear Control Systems
- Analysis and Design of Mechanisms and Machinery
- Computational Methods for Analysis and Design
- Contact Mechanics
Viewing 3D Movies
There are several 3D movies of my work below in VRML97 format. These files are best viewed using Bitmanagement's BSContact BSContact. When the movie loads you will see several controls at the bottom of the screen that have the following meaning:
- Blue button: pause/play
- Red Cone pointed down: slow playback
- Red Cone pointed up: speed up playback
- Grey Slider: shows progress, can be dragged to change the time
BSContact is required because it implements the full VRML specification, which is required for the play back controls to work. If you would like to create similar 3D movies you can use a program called Solvere4D which I have written and made available on SourceForge. Just search SourceForge for "solvere4d" and you'll find it in short order.
Publications
M.Millard, D.Wight, J.McPhee, E.Kubica and D.Wang. Human foot placement and balance in the sagittal plane. Accepted by ASME J.Biomech.Eng, 2009. WRL:walk WRL:jump AVI:walk AVI:jump
M.Millard, J.McPhee and E.Kubica. Multi-Step Forward Dynamic Gait Simulation. In CL Bottasso, editor, Multibody Dynamics: Computational Methods and Applications, pages 25-43. Springer, 2009. PDF AVI
M.Millard and H.Tizhoosh. Tuning pianos using reinforcement learning. Journal of Applied Acoustics. Accepted March 22, 2006. PDF
V.Gupta, M.Wurm, Y.Zhu, M.Millard, S.Fung, N.Gura, H.Eberle and S. Chang-Shantz. Sizzle: A standards-based end-to-end security architecture for the embedded Internet. Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing 1(4),2005. PDF
In Preparation
M.Millard, J.McPhee and E.Kubica. Bipedal foot placement and balance in 3D. WRL:walk WRL:jump WRL:turn AVI:walk AVI:jump AVI:turn
Conferences
M.Millard,J.McPhee and E.Kubica. Foot placement and balance in 3D. Proceedings of the 2009 Dynamic Walking Conference. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. POSTER ABSTRACT
M.Millard, D.Wight, J.McPhee, E.Kubica and D.Wang. Evaluation of a human foot placement model. Proceedings of the 2008 North American Congress on Biomechanics. Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. POSTER ABSTRACT
M.Millard, J.McPhee, and E.Kubica. Multi-Step Forward Dynamic Gait Simulation. Proceedings of ECCOMAS Multibody Dynamics Conference. Milan, Italy. June 2007. ABSTRACT
M.Millard, J.McPhee, and E.Kubica. Infinite Step Forward Dynamic Gait Simulation. Proceedings of the 14th Biennial conference for the Canadian Society of Biomechanics. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. August 2006 POSTER ABSTRACT
[ Motion Research Group ]
[ University of Waterloo ]
[ 200 University Ave. W. | Waterloo, Ontario, Canada | N2L 3G1 ]
[ real.uwaterloo.ca/~morg ]
[ www.uwaterloo.ca ]