Rutgers engineers have developed a smart shoe that automatically analyzes how a person walks, a technology that someday could help monitor people with Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and other movement disorders.

The prototype analyzes movement with 95.4% accuracy while counting steps and estimating calories burned.

The research, led by Simiao Niu, a biomedical engineer at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, was published in Science Advances.

UCF is leading the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) $20 million National Commercialization and Translation Institute (NCTI) initiative, a two-year pilot program designed to help promising federally funded technologies become successful companies.

The effort validates decades of impact UCF has created with helping researchers take discoveries from the lab into the marketplace — and allows the university to help enhance economic vitality across America.

Previously successful research commercialization efforts at the university include the UCF Business Incubation Program and three other NSF-funded programs: Accelerating Research Translation (ART), I-Corps and the Florida Semiconductor Engine.

Led by Professor Ivan Garibay ’00MS ’04PhD, NCTI will support developing businesses under the guidance of technology, business and research experts, including College of Engineering and Computer Science Dean Michael Georgiopoulos, and professors Thomas O’Neal ’96MS ’96MBA ’05PhD and Ron Piccolo.

Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed a new type of pressure-sensitive paint that more accurately measures the way air pushes against surfaces, reducing a key source of error in wind tunnel testing by 25%.