Driven by declining fertility rates, increased life expectancy, and migration, the western world is experiencing a shift in the percentage of elderly, which is expected to continue for the years to come. Additionally, the world’s population is expected to increase by two billion people, from 7.7 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050. To combat these changes, it is important that the population remains active, productive and independent for as long as possible, which is supported by the UN’s 3rd Sustainable Development goal focused on “ensuring healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”.

These challenges call for multi-facetted initiatives and one of these is to advance our knowledge within technologies for a musculoskeletal skeletal disorders, such as exoskeletons, as well as orthopedic devices.  

Therefore, it is with great pleasure that we invite you to the inaugural lectures for two newly appointed professors within Exoskeletons and Orthopedic Engineering, namely Professor Shaoping Bai and Professor Michael Skipper Andersen, respectively.

Professor Shaoping Bai is a leading scientist in the area of robotics and exoskeletons. He and his team have designed and developed advanced exoskeletons with broad applications in rehabilitation, industry, and our daily life, Examples include rehabilitation exoskeletons to assist walking for CP and orthopedic patients, industrial upper-body exoskeletons to assist physical workers in carrying and loading tasks to eliminate muscle fatigue and injuries, and full-body exoskeletons for the elder persons in daily activities, among others.  His vision is exoskeletons which are light, compact and smart will benefit all persons who are in need of physical motion assistance.

He received PhD degree in Robotics, Nanyang Tech. Univ. (NTU), Singapore, 2001 and did his post-doc training at McGill University, Canada in 2003-2005. He joined AAU in 2006 as an assistant professor and is now appointed as a full professor at Dept. of Materials and Production in 2020. His research areas include mechanism theory and novel mechanisms, rehabilitation and assistive robots, parallel manipulators, with special interest in kinematics, dynamics, linkage and manipulator analysis and synthesis,  human-robot interaction modelling and control. 

Prof. Bai leads and participates in a number of national and international projects in assistive robots and exoskeletons. He is the project coordinator of EU project AXO-SUIT (www.axo-suit.eu)  on assistive exoskeletons,  the project leader of Danish Grand Solutions project EXO-AIDER (www.exo-aider.dk) and Danish Independent Research Council project VIEXO.  He has served as editor of a number of books, conference proceedings and editorial board of several journals, including ASME J. Mechanisms and Robotics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, among others.

Prof. Bai has published more 200 papers on prestigious journals and conferences, with a Googlescholar H-Index of 29. He is a recipient of a number of awards, including IFToMM 2021 MEDER Best Application Paper Award, 2018 WearRAcon Grand Prize of Innovation Challenges and 2018 MEDER Best Application Paper Award. 

Professor Michael Skipper Andersen is a world-leading expert within orthopedic engineering, where his research spans developing fundamental computational methods, novel technologies, in vitro studies and clinical studies. A large part of his research has been devoted to biomechanics and in particular musculoskeletal modeling, where he has invented several novel simulation technologies that are now widely spread in the scientific community as well as available in commercial software.

His main current focus is on Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA), where he has developed the most advanced patient-specific model of a total knee replacement in the world and established advanced workflows to study early, patient-specific interventions of KOA.

Professor Andersen has received several awards for his research, including winning the 5th "Grand Challenge To Predict In Vivo Knee Loads" at the 2014 World Congress of Biomechanics, the Innovation Challenge at the 2018 WearRAcon and the 2nd place at the Mimics Innovation awards for the EMEA region in 2018,