Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences Webinars – Prof. Dr. Duygun Erol Barkana

Prof. Dr. Duygun Erol Barkana from Yeditepe University will be the guest of KHAS Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences webinar series with her speech “Recent and Future Research Projects in Robot-Assisted Rehabilitation and Education” on Monday, March 7 at 18.00.

The event will take place on Zoom and is open to anyone interested.

Abstract: In the first part of the talk, I will introduce an upper-extremity robot-assisted rehabilitation system, RehabRoby. Then, I will describe the current research efforts about integrating patients’ emotional states into robot-assisted systems to develop a personalized therapy platform. Later, I will provide information about our project called RoboRehab, an assistive audiology rehabilitation robot developed for the education and rehabilitation of deaf children. The main aim of RoboRehab is to detect the emotional states of deaf children and improve their performance and motivation during their rehabilitation. Then, I will provide information about a social navigation system that aims to develop an affective robot that acts as an assistant in the audiology department of hospitals for children with hearing impairments. In the last part of the talk, I will present going on research projects, which are the development of the wearable lower-body exoskeleton system with flexible clothing, an affective loop in socially assistive robotics as an intervention tool for children with autism (EMBOA), and an innovative technological play setting that focuses on infants at high risk for Neurodevelopmental disorder (TECH-TOYS).

Prof. Dr. Duygun Erol Barkana received her B.Sc. degree in the Department of Electrical and Engineering, Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Eskisehir, Turkey, in 2001. She then received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA, in 2003 and 2007, respectively. She is the director of the Robotics Research Laboratory at Yeditepe University. Her research interests include robot-assisted rehabilitation systems, social robots, medical robotics, human-robot interaction, dynamical systems and control, affective computing, and signal processing. Her research, supported by the European Union 7th Framework Programme, and the Scientific and Research Council of Turkey, has culminated in several publications.