BIOENGINEERING
Patrick J. Loughlin, PhD
302 Benedum Hall | 3700 O’Hara Street | Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Professor and Associate Chair
P: 412-624-9685 loughlin@pitt.edu
BioSignal and Systems Analysis Laboratory Many biological and biomedical signals and systems change over time (e.g., speech, hearing, vision, balance), and tracking these changes is important for disease monitoring and understanding the underlying physiological processes. The BioSignal and Systems Analysis Laboratory conducts research into multisensory integration and motor control, nonstationary signal processing, and the quantitative analysis and modeling of biomedical signals and systems. Specific activities include human postural control (Fig. 1); frequency tracking and instantaneous frequency estimation of biomedical signals such as gait and heart rate (Fig. 2); and developing sensory substitution modalities (e.g., vibrotactile feedback) to improve impaired sensorimotor function or for brain-machine interfaces (Fig. 3).
Fig. 2: Frequency tracking of a noisy quasi-periodic signal.
Fig. 1: Time-frequency analysis of human balance uncovers sensory adaptation [Peterka 2004, Mahboobin 2005].
Fig. 3: Subject performance in a control task with vibrotactile feedback [Quick 2014].
Selected Publications
Principal Investigator Brief Biography Patrick Loughlin earned a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Washington, an MS in bioengineering from the University of Utah, and a BS in biomedical engineering from Boston University. He has been a faculty member at Pitt since 1993. Dr. Loughlin is a Member of the Editorial Board for the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, and a Fellow of AIMBE, ASA and IEEE.
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• Quick et al., Assessing vibrotactile feedback strategies by controlling a cursor with unstable dynamics, IEEE EMBC, 2014. • Cenciarini et al., Stiffness and damping in postural control increase with age, IEEE Trans. Biomed. Engrng., 2011 • O’Connor et al., Postural adaptations to repeated optic flow stimulation in older adults, Gait & posture, 2008 • Mahboobin et al., A model-based approach to attention and sensory integration in postural control of older adults, Neuroscience letters, 2007 • Loughlin et al., A Wigner approximation method for wave propagation, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., 2005 • Mahboobin et al., Sensory re-weighting in human postural control during moving-scene perturbations, Exp. Brain Research, 2005 • Peterka et al., Dynamic regulation of sensorimotor integration in human postural control, J. Neurophys., 2004
• Loughlin et al., Spectral characteristics of visually induced postural sway in healthy elderly and healthy young subjects, IEEE Trans. Neural Sys. and Rehab. Engrng., 2001 • Loughlin, Spectrographic measurement of instantaneous frequency and the time-dependent weighted average instantaneous frequency, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., 1999 • Loughlin et al., Time-varying characteristics of visually induced postural sway, IEEE Trans. Rehab. Engrng., 1996 • Loughlin et al., On the amplitude- and frequencymodulation decomposition of signals, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., 1996 • Loughlin et al., Construction of positive timefrequency distributions, IEEE Trans. Signal Process, 1994
DEPARTMENT OF BIOENGINEERING
