Melvyn Roerdink is assistant professor Technology in Motion at the Department of Human Movement Sciences of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. 

Technology in Motion 

We are facing a time of rapid technological progress with regard to measuring, improving and stimulating human movement. My mission is to merge cutting-edge human movement science with emerging motion technologies and academic entrepreneurship to generate knowledge and solutions for and with students, educators and societal stakeholders, from which the community may benefit.

Why do we need the Interactive Walkway?

We all know that falling is a common, costly and impactful health problem. Most falls occur during walking, caused by trips, slips or misplaced steps. The ability to adapt walking to environmental circumstances largely determines someone’s risk of falling during walking. Nevertheless, low-cost validated experimental set-ups for an easy evaluation of gait-environment interactions are not available. To better understand, predict and ultimately prevent walking-related falls, Bert Coolen and I therefore developed the Interactive Walkway. This overground 10-meter walkway is instrumented with multiple Kinect v2 sensors for markerless 3D full-body movement registration. The walkway further uses a projector to present gait-dependent visual context onto the floor, such as stepping targets and obstacles. With the Interactive Walkway, the effects of environmental context variations can be examined on a comprehensive set of dependent variables of walking, including self-selected walking speed, gait characteristics, walking adaptability and attentional costs of walking. The Interactive Walkway thus allows scientists to evaluate walking in a more task-specific and comprehensive manner, which will contribute to a better understanding of walking and to unveil targeted risk factors for walking-related falls.

High technical standards

The dedicated support of the Technical Department (TO3) of Human Movement and Behavioral Sciences guarantees high technical standards for the Interactive Walkway and its software suite. Kinematic data and derived outcome measures have been validated against a marker-based gold standard in 3D motion registration. All Interactive Walkway revenues will be invested in research and development activities related to the Interactive Walkway. 

Scientific collaboration

The main network of scientific collaboration is maintained by dr. Melvyn Roerdink

More information

E  m.roerdink@vu.nl
T +31-20-5988516