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Jürgen Konczak recently gave a talk at the Dimensions of Motor Control conference that was hosted by the Technische Universität München, a premier institution in Germany. He presented research findings on the transfer of motor on proprioceptive learning that is relevant for understanding the neurophysiological mechanisms of motor skill acquisition and relearning of skills during rehabilitation. At the conference he connected with former lab member Carmen Krewer, who leads a neurorehabilitation research group at a large rehabilitation hospital outside of Munich. 

 

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. 

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.