Engineering to enhance human mobility, play, and exploration
Our undergraduate researchers presented in Mary Gates Hall today, presenting their research from 11am-1pm. Member of the community, faculty, and staff stopped by to hear about Bradley and CJ’s work developing an open-source proximal control orthosis, Sasha’s wrist-driven, wrist-hand orthosis, and Michael’s work on ankle foot orthoses as a rehabilitation tool. Great job, everyone!
Michael Rosenberg has been selected among a very competitive group of applicants to join the TL1 Multidisciplinary Predoctoral Clinical Research Summer Training Program for 2016. The training and program is funded by NIH.
Through the TL1 program’s interdisciplinary clinical and translational research experience, Michael will gain skills and development tools to help advance his research career.
The program focuses on enabling students to work with teams conducting research in the laboratory, in clinical/translational health care settings, and in the community.
Congratulations, Michael!
GeekWire, a national technology news resource, has featured Dr. Steele and Dr. Schwartz‘s Walk-DMC in a special series focused on community issues and innovative solutions to societal challenges. Lisa Stiffler reports on the analysis that is used to create Walk-DMC, an assessment tool that uses routinely collected electromyography (EMG) data to identify which kids are the strongest candidates for surgery — and to help develop alternative treatments for children needing a different solution.
“It’s a very complex problem,” said Steele, who is a co-author of a paper explaining the Walk DMC metric published this month in the journal Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. “You can have two individuals who are walking visually nearly identically,” she said, “but how they’re controlling that motion can be very different.”
To read the full article, click HERE.
Techbridge is a program that inspires girls to discover a passion for technology, science and engineering. Through hands-on learning, they empower the next generation of innovators and leaders.
We had two groups of young women join us in our lab to talk about mechanical engineering and how we use engineering principles to help individuals with movement impairments. To demonstrate the human body’s ability to control devices, the girls took turns moving a robot gripper using the electrical signals read from their own arm muscles (read more about this neat application here).
Our lab’s director, Dr. Kat Steele, and Dr. Michael Schwartz, from Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare, have developed a quantitative assessment of motor control in children with cerebral palsy called Walk-DMC, which could be used to help determine whether or not patients would benefit from aggressive, invasive surgeries to assist in walking and motion. Jennifer Langston reports on the new technique within UWToday. An exert from the article is posted below, but for the full article, read HERE.
“Only about 50 percent of children have significant improvement in their movement after these highly invasive surgeries,” said Kat Steele, a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “Our motivation has really been to figure out how we can push up these success rates.”