Research Projects:
Human-Robot-Human Interaction:

HRH

In many everyday tasks two people interact with each other. People move a large object, an instructor helps a student learn to swing a tennis racquet, and physical therapists help a patient learn to move correctly after an accident. Many of these tasks could potentially be replaced with a robot teaching an individual that task. A necessary first step is to understand human-human physical cooperation, so this research involved designing a device to measure the haptic interaction of dyads jointly working on a task. I discovered that dyads are faster than individuals, dyad members temporally specialize, and found key differences between human-human and human-robot interaction that should enable improved human-robot interaction. This work was largely performed at Northwestern University.

Gait Enhancing Mobile Shoe:

Gait Enhancing Mobile Shoe

Certain types of central nervous system damage, such as stroke, can cause an asymmetric walking gait. One rehabilitation method uses a split-belt treadmill to help rehabilitate impaired individuals. The split-belt treadmill causes each leg to move at a different speed while in contact with the ground. The split-belt treadmill has been shown to help rehabilitate walking impaired individuals on the treadmill, but there is one distinct drawback; the corrected gait does not transfer well to walking over ground. To increase the gait transference to walking over ground, I designed and built a passive shoe that admits a motion similar to that felt when walking on a split-belt treadmill. The gait enhancing mobile shoe (GEMS) alters the wearer's gait by causing one foot to move backward during the stance phase while walking over ground. No external power is required since the shoe mechanically converts the wearer's downward and horizontal forces into a backward motion. This shoe allows a patient to walk over ground while experiencing the same gait altering effects as felt on a split-belt treadmill, which should aid in transferring the corrected gait to walking in natural environments. This work is in collaboration with the Kennedy Krieger Institute.