Daniel Comadurán Márquez

Biography

About me

My name is Daniel Comaduran Marquez, I am originally from Chihuahua, Mexico. I came to Calgary to study my MSc and PhD at the University of Calgary with a fully funded scholarship from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CONACYT). My degrees were both in Biomedical Engineering, developing instrumentation to measure muscle and brain activity. I am now a postdoctoral fellow at the BCI4Kids lab at the Alberta Children’s Hospital working on developing technologies to enable children to access sports for the first time in their lives.

My research

My current research project seeks to enable children with severe motor disabilities to play sports for the first time in their lives. Our labs is one of the few in the world that research brain-computer interfaces in pediatric populations. In addition to our research team we also have a clinical program; both of these allow us to better understand the needs of the children to develop adequate technologies that will allow them to be more independent.

BRAIN CREATE Program aspirations

During my postdoctoral fellowship in Brain CREATE I hope to improve my technical skills in signal processing, data acquisition, and hardware development. The exchange opportunity in brain CREATE has allowed me to start a signal processing project in collaboration with the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies in Albani, New York, USA. One of the leading centres for brain-computer interfaces worldwide. This fellowship is an excellent opportunity to bring world-class research to Calgary.

Commercialization

My project is around the development of a ramp that enables children with disabilities to access sports for the first time in their lives. I participated in the evolve-to-innovate program from Innovate Calgary to start looking at the possibility to commercialize the device. We are further exploring the possibility to patent some of the signal processing components to control the ramp; this would enable us to commercialize more devices that can improve the lives of people with disabilities.

Publications

Comaduran Marquez, D., Kerr McNutt, M., Lillywhite, B., Robu, I., Irvine, B., Zewdie, E. Kirton, A., & Kinney-Lang, E. (2023) Development and validation of a BCI-enabled Boccia ramp for sport participation. IEEE SMC Conference Proceedings (accepted).

Keough, J. R. G., Irvine, B., Kelly, D., Wrightson, J., Marquez, D. C., Kinney-Lang, E., & Kirton, A. (2023). Fatigue in Children Using Motor Imagery and P300 Brain-Computer Interfaces. (pre-print).

Kelly, D., Irvine, B., Kinney-Lang, E., Marquez, D. C., Floreani, E. D., & Kirton, A. (2023). Exploring the Impact of Gamification on BCI Performance in Children: The Case for Personalization. (pre-print)

Valles, K. D. B., Marquez, D. C., & Johnson, M. J. (2020, February). Robotic rehabilitation therapy in Chihuahua Mexico, challenges from translating a clinical research protocol to clinical practice. In 2020 IEEE 11th Latin American Symposium on Circuits & Systems (LASCAS) (pp. 1-4). IEEE.

Marquez, D. C., Anderson, S. J., Hecker, K., & Murari, K. (2019, October). Development and Validation of a Current-Based EEG System. In 2019 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS) (pp. 1-4). IEEE.

Awards

Evolve-to-Innovate, Innovate Calgary

ACHRI Haslam Postdoctoral Fellowship

Brain CREATE Postdoctoral Fellowship

CONACYT PhD Scholarship

CONACYT MSc Scholarship

National Youth Award 2012 - Mexico