Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory

Jürgen Konczak, Director of the Human Sensorimotor Control Lab, presented a lecture on the neuromotor control processes of the cerebellum to a large lay audience at an auditorium of the University of Essen in Germany. The lecture was part of a symposium organized by Dr. Dagmar Timmann, a neurologist at the local university medical center, in honor of the Bernd Fink Foundation, who had supported Dr. Timman's and Dr. Konczak's research in the past.   

 

The results of a large international, multi-center clinical trial on using vibro-tactile stimulation (VTS) as a neuromodulation method to treat the symptoms of people with cervical dystonia have been published in the journal Parkinsonism and Related Disorders. The study was a collaboration of HSCL director Jürgen Konczak, together with former lab members Jiapeng Xu and Jinseok Oh, colleagues at the University of Minnesota Department of Preventive Medicine and Rehabilitation, and clinical researchers in neurology at the University of Calgary, the University of Genova and the University of Rome in Italy. The study provides first systematic evidence that cervical VTS can induce fast-acting improvements in abnormal head posture in patients with cervical dystonia. 

Jürgen Konczak, Director of the HSC Lab, is coauthor of a research article published in the Journal of Neurology. The paper presents a new German language screening tool for clinicians to determine cognitive impairment in people with damage or disease of the cerebellum. It summarizes the results from a large multi-center study of medical centers across Germany.

Jürgen Konczak, Director of the HSC Lab, is coauthor of a research article entitled Characterization of Upper Esophageal Sphincter Pressures Relative to Vocal Acoustics that appears in the Journal of Applied Physiology. The first author is Dr. Jesse Hoffmeister, assistant professor in the Department of Otolarnygology. The paper presents a novel measure, the pressure in the upper airways during phonation, as a potential variable to assess voice disruption in people with laryngeal dystonia.

Jürgen Konczak presented a summary of the lab's research activities on using vibro-tactile stimulation as a non-invasive neuromodulation method to treat focal dystonia of the neck and larynx to the University of Minnesota Center on Neuroengineering.