Media

UW Together – Featured Project

Keshia Media, News, Orthoses, Projects

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.

Jayna and Bradley work on bi-manual tasks (two-handed) during Jayna's visit to the Ability and Innovation Lab

ME Capstone Project Awarded Grant for Pediatric Medical Device Innovation

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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.

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Kat Steele is highlighted in the Puget Sound Business Journal

Keshia Media, News

A portrait of Dr. Kat Steele.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.

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Work by Dr. Steele and Ben Shuman featured in The Daily news post

Keshia Media, MotorControl, News, Projects

The team found that of the 473 children who had undergone surgery in their current study, those with higher Walk-DMC scores prior to surgery had better treatment outcomes, even after factoring in age and prior treatment.

The Daily, of the University of Washington, posted an article about Dr. Steele and Ben Shuman’s recent work on predicting cerebral palsy treatment outcomes based on motor modules, or muscle synergies. This work is in partnership with Michael Schwartz at Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare.  An excerpt from the article is below. To read the article in full, click here.

Ben Shuman, a PhD student in the Steele Lab, smiles while working with electromyography equipment (EMG). Photo credit: Liam Brozik

 

Walk-DMC – Kat Steele and Michael Schwartz are featured in GeekWire

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A staff member of a gait lab kneels next to a child to apply additional motion detecting markers at Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare. Another staff member sits behind a desk, observing the instrumentation on the lab computer. Photo taken by Michael Schwartz.

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.