Paolo Caravaggi, PI

Paolo Caravaggi is a Biomedical Engineer with a Ph.D. gained from the faculty of Health and Life Sciences of Liverpool University with a thesis on the biomechanics of the foot. Following his doctorate, he accepted the responsibility to conduct the research laboratory activities of the Joint Motion Lab of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (Newark, US). During this period he has helped to designing custom rigs to assess the performance of orthopedic implants on cadaver specimens, such as a novel setup to apply physiological rotations to the cervical spine in the three anatomical planes. Paolo has a strong expertise in analyzing large data sets of various biomedical signals, using custom-written codes and GUI in Matlab (although he swears he will learn Python at some point..). In 2012, Paolo moved back to Italy, to work as research engineer at the Movement Analysis Laboratory of the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli (Bologna, Italy). Ever since, he has been focusing on the functional evaluation of different orthopedic surgeries, especially of the lower limb, such as total ankle joint replacements and surgical corrections of the flat foot. Lately, he has participated in a large cohort study on the biomechanics of the diabetic foot. He has developed a software for the analysis of plantar pressure during walking, for which he has collected control barefoot data in different age groups at schools and gyms. Paolo has been visiting fellow at Universidade de São Paulo with Prof. Isabel Sacco, where he has helped to establish and validate of a new marker-based model of the longitudinal arch of the foot. Lately, he has been working on the design of a novel custom dynamic ankle-foot-orthosis for drop-foot patients with improved comfort with respect to standard solutions. Paolo loves travelling and experiencing different cultures (and food!) and is always on the go … fun at work is important and he just can’t sit at the desk for too long.

Keywords: biomechanics, orthopedics, foot, motion analysis, plantar pressure, footwear, custom solutions, 3D printing.