Medical Researcher Eduardo Martin Moraud, PhD

It’s always so humbling to learn when our products are being used for researching ways to help improve humanity. That’s exactly what Eduardo Martin Moraud is doing with his Smartsuit Pro. Moraud works as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie PostDoctoral Fellow within the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University Hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland. His department aims at developing novel therapies to alleviate and treat motor symptoms that derive from neurological disorders such as spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s disease or stroke. He’s currently using the Smartsuit Pro specifically for patients with Parkinson’s Disease. His job is to understand motor impairments caused by Parkinson’s Disease and then with that knowledge develop proper treatments for specific motor deficits.

Moraud works with one of the biggest hospitals in Switzerland that is closely associated with key research laboratories in neuroengineering and neuroscience. This close association allows them to be at the intersection of engineering, biology and medicine which in turn allows them to leverage sophisticated technologies and develop the best suited methodologies to provide the best answers to complex problems they encounter in this field.

"The Smartsuit is giving us the perfect trade off between simplicity, accuracy and flexibility"

There were many factors as to why Moraud’s team decided to use the Smartsuit Pro over other systems: fast set-up, no occlusion, and the ability to use it anywhere. However, that last point was most important for them. According to Moraud, the Smartsuit Pro provides a “flexible, unconstrained environment to naturally study these deficits, and to understand how they improve with different neuromodulation therapies”. It’s important for patients to feel comfortable and act naturally. Other systems capture data using optical cameras, which can cause occlusions in the data. Due to this, it restricts certain movements and actions a patient can perform. However, since the Smartsuit Pro contains gyroscopic and inertial-based sensors, all of the motion data is recorded without the use of reflective markers. Any movement a patient makes in the suit will be recorded. With this precision and flexibility of being used anywhere, like a patient’s home, this suit was the perfect choice!

"The intuitive and nice 3D interface and the avatar definitely helps to get the patient engaged in the task"

Also with so many people in various professions within the medical research field that have to interact with each other, they all have to be able to speak a common language. Moraud mentions that because the Smartsuit Pro offers a 3D environment that provides an easy way to capture a patient’s behavior, it also provides an “easy language” for therapists, medical doctors and scientists to interact with each other and the patient on the same level. It’s vital for all of these parties to understand each other and thankfully the Smartsuit Pro helps them achieve that.

If you’d like to follow Moraud and his team’s work, check out: www.epfl.ch and www.chuv.ch