13-07-2026
A study from the ASTROPOWER project was awarded the prize for best poster at the Powerpenia Conference 2026, the international scientific meeting dedicated to the assessment of human motor power as a marker of health, organized by the School of Human Kinetics of the University of Lisbon (FMH-ULisboa) on July 2 and 3.
The award was given to Dania Furk, a doctoral student in the NOVA FCT PhD Program in Biomedical Engineering. The distinction recognizes a set of results that connect space research with the prevention of muscle power loss in aging.
Making muscles more powerful
ASTROPOWER, funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and led by Professor Hugo Gamboa from the Department of Physics at NOVA FCT, is developing a training system with acoustic biofeedback based on muscle activity. The basic idea relies on using sound to guide how a person activates their muscles during exercise.
Early results point in a clear direction: with acoustic biofeedback, the muscles of the lower limb began activating more quickly, favoring the production of muscle power, that is, the ability to generate force rapidly. This is the capacity that declines first with age and underpins everyday actions such as standing up from a chair, climbing a step, or recovering balance to avoid a fall.
The team emphasizes that these are initial results, collected over a period of about a month and a half, but sufficient to show that the strategy produces measurable changes and to justify continuing this line of work.
A “lens” on physiology, outside the lab
More than simply confirming that power loss exists, the project aims to intervene in its causes. To do this, it closely monitors physiological behavior during exercise: heart rate, speed and force of each movement, millisecond timings, and muscle fiber activation, all in a non-invasive way. This detailed observation, almost like a magnifying glass over human physiology, makes it possible to detect harmful patterns, such as the simultaneous activation of opposing muscles, and then correct them through training.
A distinctive feature of the work was taking it “out of the lab.” Data collection was carried out in real-world settings, in places where people exercise, including a senior university, demonstrating that the tools work outside a laboratory context. The team is also developing a new tool for assessing motor power and associated biomarkers. Based on reference values, it will be possible to estimate each person’s muscle “functional age,” that is, their real physical capacity, and compare it with their chronological age. The ambition is for this type of assessment to become as valued as a clinical test: just as high cholesterol prompts action, these physiological markers could also encourage people to change their habits and improve their condition.
From space to Earth
The project embodies one of ESA’s key goals: the transfer of research developed for space into applications on Earth. Astronauts in microgravity and older adults share similar processes of muscle degradation. By finding ways to reduce this through sound, ASTROPOWER opens a path for countermeasures useful both for space missions and for aging on Earth.
The results are supported by three studies involving young and older populations, totaling 154 participants, and by the work of around 27 researchers, trainees, and collaborators from the institutions involved, in a collaboration between NOVA FCT, the University of Seville, TMG-BMC, Plux Wireless Biosignals, Harvard-MIT, and AFFIDEA Portugal.
The award at the Powerpenia Conference 2026 internationally validates this research line and reinforces the project’s central message: inspired by space, it is possible to find new exercise and feedback strategies to preserve muscle power throughout life.
More information about the project at astro-power.eu.
