Talks by Paul Tennent and Alex Turner

Paul Tennent and Alex Turner, a new Assistant Professor in the school, will give talks during this week's digital lab meeting.

Paul Tennent - Soma Design and Sensory Misalignment

This talk is the one I’d be giving under the warm Hawaiian sun while sipping a Mai Tai and wearing a grass kilt if it wasn’t for the blasted virus…

I’ll be discussing the outcomes of a workshop between KTH and the MRL where we explored balance from the perspectives of both Soma Design and Sensory Misalignment. In the doing of that workshop we established that soma design was a likely candidate method for designing sensory misalignment experiences, that sensory misalignment was a good tool for performing somaesthetic defamiliarization. We explored the pluralisation of somatic experiences and developed the concept of a somaesthetic trajectory. Plus we hung people upside down from the flying harness and tickled them to see what would happen, and accidently made a drunkenness simulator. I’ll be presenting this exact talk at CHI-Nordic (one of the many localised online CHI paper presentation sessions) on Monday, so this is a good chance to test it.

Alex Turner - Improving the diagnosis and treatment of gait and movement disorders

Gait disorders can cause a loss of freedom and connection with society. They are often costly to treat requiring lifelong care and can have significant impacts not only on the people that suffer with them, but their families too. With the heterogeneity of symptoms in movement disorders, they are often very difficult to treat and analyse, with few opportunities to gather high quality accurate data. This work deals with how we can better diagnose and treat movement disorders by looking at low cost-effective data driven approaches, and how we can use this information to give healthcare professionals the best opportunity for treat these disorders.