Engineering to enhance human mobility, play, and exploration
Congratulations to Jessica for being acknowledged by the Department of Mechanical Engineering for her academic achievements and potential for success within her masters studies.
Jessica is dedicated to creating a pediatric exoskeleton which promotes improved walking patterns during daily life, outside of therapy sessions. This fellowship will allow Jessica to devote more time towards her research and studies. Congrats!
This past Friday, the University unleashed its most ambitious philanthropic campaign, UW Together. The Ability & Innovation Lab was honored to have a team of undergraduate’s work featured, an elbow-driven orthosis for Jayna.
This story is now featured in the Seattle Times NW Showcase section, and Kat, our Director, is featured in an ad to the right of the story. To read and watch the video, CLICK HERE. We are proud to partner with the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE) here in the College of Engineering. Innovation occurs at the intersection of multiple disciplines, and Together we can change the world.
Go Dawgs and Go Biomechanics!
Here at the Ability & Innovation Lab we are fortunate to partner with amazing families and people who are our user experts for feedback and ideas when creating new devices and designs. Jayna and her family are fantastic partners in the design project for Jayna, alongside our undergraduate students. The second prototype is now underway to improve the comfort, donning and doffing, and applicability of Jayna’s elbow-driven device to enable the use of her left arm during two handed tasks.
UW Together presents Jayna’s story HERE.
A UW Mechanical Engineering capstone team‘s project has been awarded a grant to continue the development of a pediatric exoskeleton. The team collaborated with physical therapists at Seattle Children’s Hospital to develop their prototype and entered into the 2016 Target Challenge grant competition.
New England Pediatric Device Consortium (NEPDC) and the Center for Translation of Rehabilitation Engineering Advances and Technology (TREAT) Award $150K between four Medical Device Innovator teams.
We are pleased to announce Jessica Zistasis, a member of the capstone team, will join our lab to pursue this project and further its development for her MS.
Our director of the Human Ability and Engineering Lab, Kat Steele, is highlighted in the Puget Sound Business Journal. Below a blurb from the article can be read, but to read in full, follow this LINK.
People in Research: How Kat Steele applied her engineering roots to health care
“Mechanical engineering is so flexible that you can work from aerospace to medicine,” she explained. “Prosthetic limbs, joint replacements…all those devices they are developing now for health care have a lot of mechanical engineering in their roots.”
Now at the UW, Steele is the director of the Human Ability & Engineering Lab where she and her team focus on need-based human-centered designs, mainly for people with cerebral palsy, spinal cord injuries or those who have had a stroke.