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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. 

Shima Amini, a master student in the HSC lab, gave her first verbal presentation at a scientific meeting, the Fall Symposium of the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science. She spoke about an ongoing clinical trial that investigates the usability of a wearable vibration device to treat the voice symptoms of people with laryngeal dystonia. Her preliminary analysis showed that wearing the device reduced voice symptoms in approximately 65% of participants. 

 Jürgen Konczak, Director of the Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory, presented to the International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics on the use of robotic devices to assess proprioceptive function in clinical populations, such as people with stroke or spinal cord injury. Together with colleagues from Italy and Denmark he organized a workshop on Robot-aided Somatosensory-based Approaches for the Neurorehabilitation of Sensorimotor Function.  

Chronic cough is one of the most common reasons for patients to seek medical care. In up to 18% of the global adult population, cough persists for longer than 8 weeks. Together with Dr. Stephanie Misono and colleagues in otolaryngology at the University of Minnesota, we investigated if  vibro-tactile stimulation of the larynx can reduce symptoms in people with chronic cough using a vibration collar developed in the lab. Results show that a 2-week daily use yielded a meaningful improvement in cough-related quality of life. They were published in the journal Laryngoscope.

Laryngeal dystonia (LD) is a task-specific focal dystonia of laryngeal muscles that impairs speech and voice production. At present, there is no cure for LD. The HSCL team, together with colleagues in Otolaryngology and the Dept. of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, has worked on an intervention that applies vibration to the neck to reduce voice symptoms in people with LD. The first results of an randomized clinical trial show that over 50% of participants responded to vibro-tactile stimulation and showed improvements in their voice symptoms. The findings are published in the journal Frontiers of Neurology. 

Jürgen Konczak, Director of the HSC Lab, was invited by the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland to give the annual Clark-Whitall Lecture on Motor Development. The title of his lecture was The silent sense and motor control during the life span. It outlined how proprioceptive information that is used to control muscle tone and to become aware of our body develops from childhood to old age and how it impacts the motor control for balance and our every-day activities. 

Cervical dystonia is a neurological disorder that leads to persistent, uncontrollable muscle spasms of neck muscles. People affected have an altered head posture and often experience persistent pain. Results from a new multi-center clinical trial show that vibro-tactile stimulation of neck muscles, a new treatment approach developed in the HSC Laboratory, can alleviate pain of people affected by the disease, The findings of this study are now published in the journal Neurological Sciences.  Two former doctoral students Jiapeng Xu and Jinseok Ok are first and coauthor of the publication. The study was an international collaboration with the University of Calgary in Canada and the University of Genova and La Sapienza University of Rome in Italy.

Jürgen Konczak presented the lab's latest research on the use of vibro-tactile stimulation to treat focal dystonia of the head, neck and voice in a university-wide seminar at the University of Rome. The talk was organized as a hybrid meeting by the Department of Neurology and Neuroscience and had over 60 attendees from clinical, engineering and basic sciences.