News / Blog

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.

Jürgen Konczak, PhD, visited the Istituto Italiano diTecnologia in Genoa, Italy and gave a seminar on translating basic research into medical technology. He spoke about his group's research on developing vibrotactile stimulation technology to treat dystonia.

Viola Winter, doctoral candidate in the Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory in the School of Kinesiology, is the lead author of a new publication titled "Dyad motor learning in a wrist-robotic environment: Learning together is better than learning alone," that appeared in the journal Human Movement Sciences.

Researchers for the Human Sensorimotor Control Lab (HSCL), led by director Jürgen Konczak, PhD, professor in the School of Kinesiology, recently published an article titled, "Ankle proprioception in children with cerebral palsy," to the Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine.

Dr. Su is a specialist in hand biomechanics and is involved in medical device development. 

Jacquelyn Sertic, PhD student in the School of Kinesiology and member of the Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory (HSCL) and the Center for Applied & Translational Sensory Science, has been awarded the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 school year.

In cooperation with U of M otolaryngologist Stephanie Misono, MD, MPH and her team, Jürgen Konczak, PhD, professor in the School of Kinesiology, and director of the Human Sensorimotor Control Lab (HSCL), and recent HSCL graduates Jiapeng Xu, PhD, Jinseok Oh, PhD, and Arash Mahnan, PhD, published an article in JAMA Otolaryngology.