Jade Samping received the Best Talk Award (Runner-up) at Heriot-Watt’s Health and Care Innovation Conference for Early Career Researchers 2026, hosted by the University’s Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies, for her presentation “Understanding Rehabilitation Following ACL Injury in Female Athletes.”
The event brought together Early Career Researchers from across the University to share and discuss recent research on topics related to the health and care arena.
Jade’s PhD explores nonlinear movement analysis to understand rehabilitation and return-to-sport readiness in female athletes following anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury.
SUPERLab is guest editing a Special Issue in Sensors, “Advancing Human Gait Monitoring with Wearable Sensors,” open for submissions until 20 September 2026.
Human gait is a key indicator of health, mobility, and neurological function. This Special Issue explores the latest developments in wearable devices, data acquisition, signal processing, and machine learning for gait assessment, with applications spanning clinical assessment, rehabilitation, fall-risk prediction, sports science, and occupational health.
The Special Issue is guest edited by Dr Encarna MicĂł-Amigo (Heriot-Watt University) and Dr Sauvik Das Gupta (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan), and has already published seven papers. Find out more and submit on the Special Issue page.
Dr Mustafa Ahmed received an Honourable Mention at the 1st Annual IMPEE Conference for his presentation, “Body-Aware Dual-Stream Fusion for Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensors.”
The project explored how combining wrist and lower-back wearable sensor data can improve recognition of everyday activities such as walking, mopping, and carrying shopping, achieving up to 93% accuracy.
Mustafa’s research focuses on wearable technology and AI for real-world monitoring of prosthetics and mobility.
Sophia Otálora González was awarded the best 1st-year PhD Prize within IMPEE for her poster presentation on PGR Day.
The project was about Classification of Medication States in Parkinson’s Disease Patients Through Gait Analysis which was also presented in the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Digital Health (ICDH)
Sophia’s PhD is focused on the assessment of medication effect in patients with Parkinson’s Disease.
IMPEE welcomed Dr Gaku Kutsuzawa from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
Heriot-Watt University was delighted to host Dr Gaku Kutsuzawa from the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), one of Japan’s largest public research organisations, for a two-day visit in September.
The first day of the visit centred on a workshop coordinated by Dr. Micó Amigo, beginning with a tour of the University’s Immersive Suite and followed by presentations from colleagues across psychology, health, robotics, and design. Dr. Kutsuzawa delivered a keynote on his research into emotion mapping, which stimulated engaging discussion on potential intersections with Heriot-Watt’s ongoing projects.