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Lojze Vodovnik - person, teacher and scientist
Lojze Vodovnik was born on 6 September 1933 in Maribor where he
also finished high school. In 1957, he graduated from the Faculty of Electrical
Engineering in Ljubljana. He got his first job in the company 'Elektromedicina',
where he developed a number of devices for therapeutical stimulation of nerves
and muscles. In 1959, he was elected teaching assistant for the subjects
“Electromedical appliances”, “Industrial electronics” and “Rectifiers” at the
Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Ljubljana. In 1963, he also passed the
doctor's degree at the same faculty. The same year, he was elected assistant
professor for the subjects “Electronic measuring instruments”, “Survey of
technical cybernetics”, “Electromedical appliances” and “Remote control and
measuring”. Next year, he left for USA for a one-year specialization to Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland. There he continued his research on new
possibilities for the rehabilitation of the disabled on the basis of electronic
and cybernetic means. After his return to Ljubljana, he established a Laboratory
for Medical Engineering and Biocybernetics at the Faculty of Electrical
Engineering. In 1966, he was invited to the Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland as visiting professor, and, until 1969, in addition to lecturing in
the Ljubljana faculty, he was giving lectures also in Cleveland. In 1967, he was
elected associate professor and, in 1973, he nominated full professor at the
Faculty of Electrical Engineering. In 1973, he was elected Vice Dean of the
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and two years later Dean of the same faculty.
In 1977, he became a corresponding member of the Slovenian Academy for Sciences
and Arts, and in 1983 he was elected regular member of this institution. Between
1992 and 1995 he was secretary of the section for mathematical, physical,
chemical and technical sciences and since 1995 a member of the presidential
board of the Academy. In 1998 the academician Professor Lojze Vodovnik, D. Sc.,
retired and became professor emeritus of the University of Ljubljana.
It is impossible to describe the image of a man, who was so exceptional in all
of his life and who left such a strong impression on his environment. He was a
person with an outstanding intelligence; however, he never exposed this to
others. With a proverbial simplicity he was accessible to anybody, also to
cleaning lady whose work he valued and respected as anybody else's. He had a
noble-minded relation to all people he met in his life. He was unselfish, he
believed people and trusted them. He liked to help his co-workers in critical
situations. With honest people he was correct and encouraged them and supported
them constantly. He was very pleased with every success of his fellow workers.
Colleagues and co-workers from the faculty, scientists whom he was meeting all
over the world, were therefore his sincere friends. He was an extremely warm and
affectionate personality. His endless honesty was sometimes on the verge of
naivety. He was a good man.
As a teacher he was among those professors who confided in students and trusted
them. He encouraged students and respected them, he appreciated their own ideas.
He acquainted them with biocybernetics, which underlines the engineering
approach to biological systems. He was all the time discovering new fields still
in their early stages and passing his enthusiasm to students. It was an
exceptional honor for his students when they could cooperate with him in a
research work in his laboratory, gradually becoming members of his team, as the
criteria for this were very severe. Such students were chosen with a special
visionary feeling.
He was a very exacting mentor, accurate, consistent and strict, especially to
his closer fellow workers. He educated several generations of his successors who
will always be grateful to him for his great contribution as a teacher,
scientist and exceptional human being.
The scientific research work of Professor Lojze Vodovnik is rich and
exceptionally diverse. Besides the basic electrotechnical field, it reaches to
several other fields, also border domains, of science. On his scientific
research path, he never avoided challenges originating either from engineers,
medical doctors or everyday life. On this path, several coincidences happened
which decisively influenced the future development of the young engineer of
electrotechnical sciences with an extraordinary intellectual potential and
ardent desire to discover new horizons. His basic desire to be creative in the
field of medical electronics, for which reason he became employed in the company
Elektromedicina, was left behind for many years by being appointed university
teaching assistant in 1959. However, it was never been suppressed. His
postgraduate studies, including the master’s and doctor's degree under the
mentorship of Professor Aleš Strojnik, a scientist with international renown,
were namely all accomplished in the field of electron microscopy. In spite of
the circumstance that, at the time, this field culminated exactly in Ljubljana,
it did not present suitable conditions for the fulfillment of his ambitions. For
his further development, the contacts with Professor Rajko Tomović from the
Belgrade Electrotechnical Faculty were of paramount importance. Professor
Tomović also arranged a meeting with the “father” of cybernetics, Professor
Wiener, and Professor Reswick in Opatia in 1962. An invitation to the Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland was a unique chance to realize his
scientific ambitions. The time he spent there is most probably one of his highly
creative scientific periods. At that time, he set, together with Professor
Reswick and co-workers, theoretical bases for the functional electrical
stimulation and designed in detail the phases of operation denominated as
electronic bypass. He sincerely hoped that, by means of the new rehabilitation
method, it would be possible to restore the original function of the paralyzed
limbs to a high degree. After his return to Ljubljana, he set with great
enthusiasm the basis for the Ljubljana rehabilitation research program, which
later on grew into the Ljubljana Rehabilitation Engineering Center with a marked
financial support of the U.S. Ministry for Health. At the time, this was one of
two foreign projects and, later on, the only project outside the United States
supported by said U.S. government institution. The basic aim thereof was to
embody technologically the rich ideas of Professor Vodovnik. Besides his
scientific ingenuity, he had an exceptional gift to gather the right people
around himself and to highly them motivate. He succeeded in establishing a
genuine relationship between different professional profiles, such as medical
doctors, biologists, physiotherapists, medical nurses, engineers and other
people. Such cooperation was considered to serve as an example for other centers
of this type in the United States. He was conscious that a success of such a
complex program depended on highly coordinated teamwork. Further developments
wholly confirmed such vision, and today the team approach in medicine and
elsewhere seems to be self-evident. The model operation of the Ljubljana
Rehabilitation Engineering Center was one of the significant reasons for which
the U.S. Ministry for Health co-financed its program for four project intervals
until 1987.
An immense inner force was driving Professor Vodovnik to new research fields. As
early as in 1967, he tried to penetrate as many secrets of life as possible and
understand them from self-organization of living organisms to information
processing in the central nervous system. Only in this way is it possible to
understand that, in the course of the second project interval, he transferred
the field of classical functional electrical stimulation that he himself
initiated, to his fellow workers, numerous already, whereas he himself entered
the research of therapeutical effects of electrical stimulation on voluntary
control and spasticity. Opening new research areas became a continuing
orientation that directed all of his further deliberations and research work
until his retirement. In his desire to help the patients with locomotion
disabilities, he fervently studied the possibilities of using hypnosis for
improving gait patterns at hemiparetic patients, not without theoretical basis,
as he knew a lot about information processing in the brain. Although this
research yielded good results, witness whereof are articles in valued scientific
journals, it was prematurely stopped because of reproaches that he tackled
border sciences.
He discovered a new research field immediately. He believed in positive effects
of electrical stimulation of different kinds without restraint. He therefore
started to fight the grave medical problem – healing bedsore and chronic wounds
by means of electrical stimulation. He was very well acquainted with the
influence of the immune system on the process of healing; therefore, he chose it
as a research objective. The first results of this research attracted the
attention of the U.S. Ministry for Health and of the European Union so that
these two institutions co-financed further research. As at that time financing
of the Rehabilitation Engineering Center in Ljubljana was cut off, the above
funds were could replace the loss so that comprehensive evaluations study of the
control hospitals in several cities in the former Yugoslavia could be carried
out. A new therapeutical approach was created by which a wound, in several
cases, healed much faster than in cases when treated by classical methods.
Often, a dangerous and expensive surgical intervention could thus be avoided.
Although the basic project has long been concluded, the research is still being
carried out, yet to a minor extent, so that an important web basis for designing
and prognosing the healing of chronic wounds is being created.
It is a paradox that, on the one hand the electric current stimulates the growth
of healthy cell and tissue and that, on the other hand, it hinders the growth of
cancerous tissue. This problem was the last one, which he was able to approach,
but he had an explanation and model conception also for this phenomenon. In the
last years of his creative work, idea of an overall influence of electric
currents on living organisms was growing in his mind. He named the phenomena,
triggered in living organisms by electric currents or electric fields, with a
common term “cell and tissue electrotechnics”. For this reason, Professor
Vodovnik was not only “the father” of functional electrical stimulation, but
also the founder of a much wider field of cell electrotechnics which, after he
passed away, has successfully developed and has its peak exactly in Ljubljana,
which is recognized worldwide.
The exceptional success of scientific research work of Professor Vodovnik was
confirmed with awards which he received in his life. As early as 1964, he was
awarded the prize of ETAN for the best article within the board for medical
electronics. He received twice the award of the foundation Sklad Borisa Kindriča
(the main Slovenian government award for scientist and artists), for the first
time in 1971 and for the second time in 1986. In 1974, he was awarded a medal of
thanks of the company Elektromedicina for long-year cooperation in their
development program. In 1978, he was awarded with a medal of gratitude of the
institution ETAN. He received a medal from the Institute for the Rehabilitation
of the Disabled on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of
the Institute in 1980. In the same year, he was also rewarded with an order of
labor with golden wreath. In 1984, he received a medal of IEEE on the occasion
of the 100th anniversary of its existence. The award Vidmarjeva nagrada as
acknowledgement for his pedagogic work was granted to him in 1987. The same
year, he also received the award of AVNOJ; the order of labor with red flag was
granted to him in 1990. In 1992 he was elected fellow member of IEEE. In 1995 he
received an award of the Republic of Slovenia for outstanding achievements in
science.
People with whom he worked, without doubt contributed to the diversity of fields
which he detected in his rich life because working with him was very simple; he
practically allowed complete freedom of research. He has also allowed such
freedom to himself so that he was dealing with problems which seemed to be
interesting and which molested patients and people in general. He sincerely
tried to find solutions applicable to medical doctors and which some time will
offer help or already have helped to improve the health of man and the quality
of life. Such vision and the desire to aid the human beings were the basis of
all of his work and touched all of us in his vicinity sooner or later.
Lojze Vodovnik died 14 June 2000.
Damijan Miklavčič
Stanislav Reberšek
Alojz Kralj
The
Vodovnik Award
At the 2000 IFESS Meeting in Aalborg, Denmark, the
Executive Board of IFESS instituted the Vodovnik Student Paper Competition in
honor of the late Dr. Vodovnik, consisting of three prizes to be awarded to the
best three papers submitted and presented at IFESS conferences by students.
At IFESS 2001 the Cleveland FES Center instituted a traveling trophy, sort of
like the Stanley Cup, for the winner of the Vodovnik student paper competition.
It was a large plaque that was to be engraved with the name of the winner, then
displayed in his or her home laboratory for a year until the next IFESS. In
2003 the FES Institute sent a donation of $1500 to IFESS that was designated to
support student participation. As a testament to the academic prowess of
our competition winners we place the results of the competition to date along
with links to the papers presented at the conferences that won the competitions.
Vodovnik Student Paper Competition Prize Winners:
2007 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
2006 - Mount Zao, Japan
2005 - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2004 - Bournemouth, United Kingdom
2003 - Brisbane, Australia
2002 - Ljubljana, Slovenia
2001 - Cleveland, Ohio, USA
2000 - Aalborg, Denmark
2000 - Aalborg, Denmark
First Prize:
Schuettler,Martin, Stieglitz,Thomas
"18 polar Hybrid Cuff Electrodes for Stimulation of Peripheral Nerves“
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2001 -
Cleveland, USA:
First Prize:
Dawn M. Taylor, Arizona State University.
"Using Virtual Reality
to Test the Feasibility of Controlling an Upper Limb FES System Directly From
Multiunit Activity in the Motor Cortex"
Second Prize:
Thomas C. Fuhr, Institute of Automatic Control Engineering,
Technixche Universitat Munchen, Munich Germany.
"Walk! - Experiments with a
Cooperative Neuroprosthetic System for the Restoration of Gait"
Third Prize:
Petra Mela, University of Twente.
"Muscle Length Dependence of
Optimal Stimulation Patterns"
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2002 - Ljubljana, Slovenia:
First Prize:
V. Vince et al.
"Biocompatibility testing of Platinum"
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2003 - Brisbane, Australia:
First Prize: Thomas
O'Halloran et al
"Effect of modifying stimulation profile on loading response during
FES-corrected Foot Drop"
Second Prize:
Che Fornusek and Glen Davis
"Maximising muscle forces during FES-LCE via low pedalling cadence"
Third Prize:
Peter Boord et al
"Alpha band activity during eye-closure in peaople with spinal ciord injury"
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2004 - Bournemouth, UK:
First Prize:
Michael Russold
(Liverpool UK)
A stomal sphincter configured from the rectus abdominis muscle in pigs.
First results.
Russold MF, Ramnarine I, Ashley Z, Sutherland H, Salmons S, Jarvis JC
Second Prize:
Eric Chemineau (Aalborg Denmark)
A Modeling Study of the Recording Selectivity of Longitudinal Intrafascicular
Electrodes
Chemineau ET, Schnabel V, Yoshida K
Third Prize:
Dries Hettinga (Brunel UK and Alberta Canada) FES-rowing for persons with Spinal
Cord Injury
Hettinga DM, Andrews BJ, Wheeler GD, Jeon JY, Verellen J, Laskin JJ, Olenik LM,
Lederer R, Burnham R, Steadward RD
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2005: Montreal, Canada:
First Prize:
Ferrante S.
Quantitative evaluation of stimulation strategies for FES cycling
Ferrante S., Saunders B., Duffell L., Pedrocchi A., Hunt K., Perkins T.,
Donaldson N.
Second Prize:
Klakowicz PM
Increased H-reflexes boost muscle contractions during tetanic stimulation of the
tibial nerve in neurologically-intact persons
Klakowicz PM, Baldwin ERL, Lagerquist O, Collins DF
Third Prize:
Kurstjens GAM
Intraoperative recording of neurographic signals from cuff electrodes on
extradural sacral roots in human
Kurstjens GAM, Rijkhoff NJM, Borau A, Rodríguez A, Sinkjćr T.
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2006: Mount Zao, Miagi, Japan:
First Prize:
Milan Djilas (Demar Project)
Second Prize:
Hilton Kaplan (University of Southern California)
Third Prize:
Robert Gaunt (University of Alberta)
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2007: Shriners Hospital for Children, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, USA:
First Prize:
1st place - Ann M. Tokay - Shriners Hospitals for Children, Philadelphia, PA
Second Prize:
2nd place - Robert A. Gaunt - University of Alberta - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Third Prize:
3rd place - Daniel R. Moroz - University of Alberta - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
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