Inventing tomorrow’s assistive technology
Professor Alexandre Campeau-Lecours, his team at ULaval’s Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, and their partners are developing robotics and mechatronics technology to help people living with physical disabilities every day.
Project architects
Alexandre Campeau-Lecours
Associate professor at the Faculty of Science and Engineering (Mechanical Engineering Department)
Member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Rehabilitation and Social Integration (CIRRIS) and the Université Laval Robotics Laboratory
Team
PhD students: Marianne Boyer, Gabrielle Lemire, Sy Nguyen Tan
Master’s students: Jade Clouâtre, Charles Doyon, Gabriel Faucher
Bachelor’s students: Dominic Bédard, Bianka Huot, Charles Fiset
Research engineers: Sarah Vigneault, Sarah Latour
Developing assistive technology
Professor Alexandre Campeau-Lecours’s rehabilitation engineering team is developing robotics, mechatronics, and artificial intelligence technology to help people living with physical disabilities carry out activities of daily living such as eating, writing, and picking things up. Working with a variety of healthcare partners, the team is creating prototypes and measuring their performance to come up with the best solutions. This future-critical technology will help more people who are losing their independence help themselves with less outside assistance.
Preventing workplace injuries
Rehabilitation engineering is also helpful in the workplace. In medical laboratories, the team has worked with physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and kinesiology experts to develop worker arm supports and smart sensors. These tools monitor workers’ movements and alert them if their position could lead to injury. The tools can be used both to prevent musculoskeletal injuries and assist employees after an injury.
Personalizing rehabilitation thanks to intervention technology
Physical rehabilitation exercise intensity and frequency are two keys to successfully acquiring and recovering motor functions after trauma or with specific medical conditions. New robotic systems help therapists ensure that their patients get the right amount of therapy at the right difficulty for their condition using wearable smart sensors to analyze daily movements. This technology also allows therapists to set meaningful goals for patients and get tangible information about patients’ progress.
The new technology will help people living with diseases such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease.
Monitoring rehabilitation to personalize it and make it more effective—an advance made possible thanks to the technology developed by Professor Alexandre Campeau-Lecours’s team.
To make sure the new technology benefits people, Alexandre Campeau-Lecours encourages his students to commercialize their products.
What's next
Professor Campeau-Lecours and his team will be busy with multiple projects over the next five years. Among other things, they will be developing arm supports, orthotics, and prosthetics to help people carry out activities of daily living. They will also be working on other technology such as exoskeletons using mechanical systems, robotic systems, and artificial intelligence, as needed.
Université Laval au cœur de nos vies
Podcast
Learn more about the concrete applications of Alexandre Campeau-Lecours’s research in this interview with Valérie Gaudreau, editor-in-chief of daily newspaper Le Soleil.
Listen to the podcastULaval Nouvelles article
Discover Alexandre Campeau-Lecours’s career, from his childhood curiosity and love of engineering to his research and teaching at Université Laval.
Read the ULaval News article (in French)