CMBBE 2024 Recap

Members of the Steele Lab traveled to Vancouver, BC for the 19th International Symposium on Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering (CMBBE) hosted by the University of British Columbia.

PhD candidate, Mackenzie Pitts, gave a poster presentation on “Inferring Unmeasured Inertial Data from Sparse Sensing for Treadmill Running”. Steele Lab Alumni and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Emory University, Michael Rosenberg, gave a podium presentation titled “Recurrent Neural Network Gait Signatures Encode Speed-Induced Changes in Post-Stroke Gait Quality.”

In addition to sharing their research at the conference, the Steele Lab enjoyed connecting with fellow biomechanics and biomedical engineering researchers as well as exploring the beautiful campus at UBC.

Switch Kit Workshop at Boyer Clinic

Steele Lab members, Mia Hoffman, Riley Bernas, and Katie Landwehr led a “Switch Kit” Workshop at Boyer Clinic in Seattle, WA.

The workshop aimed to teach Pediatric Physical Therapists, Occupational Therapists, Speech-Language Pathologists, and Educators how to use a new system we have designed with local families and clinicians for inclusive play options in early intervention. The Boyer Team also got to try a variety of adaptive switches Mia, Kate, and Alisha made.

Stay tuned for more on this project!

  • A diverse group of individuals enthusiastically raising their hands to high five and connect their hands to activate a DIY switch.
  • A conference room filled with people seated and standing around a large table while engaging with games and music on an iPad via DIY switches.
  • In a conference room, two women engage in hands-on work with DIY adaptive switches and an iPad.

Spring 2024 CREATE Research Showcase

The Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE) hosted a Research Showcase and Community Day 2024 on May 20th. These events brought industry and community partners — leaders working and living in the disability and accessibility space — together with faculty and student researchers. Co-sponsored by HuskyADAPT. CREATE’s mission is to make technology accessible and to make the world accessible through technology.

Steele Lab members, Alexandra (Sasha), Mia, Kate, and Alisha,  presented posters at the CREATE Research Showcase to highlight design, development & research of technology to support individuals with disabilities.

Mia, Kate, and Alisha presented a poster on “The Switch Kit: bridging the gap in therapeutic toys for children with medical complexities“. This research involved the creation and evaluation of a therapeutic toy named the “Switch Kit,” designed for young children with medical complexities. The kit allows family members and clinicians to customize switches tailored to the unique needs of each child.

Alexandra presented a poster on “Camera-Based Interface for Hand Function Assessment”. Currently, hand function assessment (e.g., joint range of motion) in a clinical setting is done with low-resolution tools and oftentimes in a subjective manner that is time-consuming. With a camera-based interface, we wanted to improve the speed of collecting information about patient’s hand function, improve repeatability and objectivity, and enhance result presentation for both patients and clinicians.

MR Ebers, JP Williams, KM Steele, JN Kutz (2024) “Leveraging arbitrary mobile sensor trajectories with shallow recurrent decoder networks for full-state reconstruction,”

Journal Article in IEEE Access

Sensing is a fundamental task for the monitoring, forecasting, and control of complex systems. In many applications, a limited number of sensors are available and must move with the dynamics. Currently, optimal path planning, like Kalman filter estimation, is required to enable sparse mobile sensing for state estimation. However, we show that arbitrary mobile sensor trajectories can be used. By adapting the Shallow REcurrent Decoder (SHRED) network with mobile sensors, their time-history can be used to encode global information of the measured high-dimensional state space.

Summary figure of a shallow recurrent decoder network (SHRED) leveraging mobile sensors to reconstruct full state-space estimates from sparse dynamical trajectories. (Left) Sensor trajectory history encodes global information of the spatio-temporal dynamics of the sparsely measured system. In this work, we evaluate three challenging datasets, including forced isotropic turbulence, global sea-surface temperature, and human biomechanics. (Middle) The mobile SHRED architecture can (i) embed the multiscale physics of a system into a compact and low-dimensional latent space, and (ii) provide a mapping from the sparse mobile sensors to a full state estimate. (Right) The high-dimensional and complex system states can be reconstructed, provided training data for the dynamical trajectory of the sensor(s) is available.Aim: We leverage sparse mobile sensor trajectories for full-state estimation, agnostic to sensor path.

Methods: Using modern deep learning architectures, we show that a sequence-to-vector model, such as an LSTM (long, short-term memory) network, with a decoder network, dynamic trajectory information can be mapped to full state-space estimates.

Results: We demonstrate that by leveraging mobile sensor trajectories with shallow recurrent decoder networks, we can train the network (i) to accurately reconstruct the full state space using arbitrary dynamical trajectories of the sensors, (ii) the architecture reduces the variance of the mean-squared error of the reconstruction error in comparison with immobile sensors, and (iii) the architecture also allows for rapid generalization (parameterization of dynamics) for data outside the training set. Moreover, the path of the sensor can be chosen arbitrarily, provided training data for the spatial trajectory of the sensor is available.

Interpretation: The time-history of mobile sensors can be used to encode global information of the measured high-dimensional state space.

Congratulations ME Class of 2024!

Congratulations to Steele Lab members Dr. Charlotte Caskey, Mackenzie Pitts, and Victoria (Tori) Landrum who all completed their respective degrees and participated in 2024 Mechanical Engineering Department Graduation ceremony.

Dr. Caskey earned her Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering AND received the Distinguished Dissertation Award for her dissertation titled “Effects of Spinal Stimulation on Neuromechanics of Gait for Children with Cerebral Palsy”. Dr. Kat Steele performed the Hooding Ceremony to recognize her achievements. Dr. Caskey will be continuing her academic career as a Post-Doc in the Human Neuromechanics Laboratory at the University of Florida in Gainesville!

Mackenzie earned her Masters in Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Kat Steele and Dr. Cristine Agresta performed the Hooding Ceremony to recognize her achievements. Mackenzie will be continuing with her PhD here at the University of Washington.

Tori earned her Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering AND received the Department of Mechanical Engineering Outstanding Research Award for her work with the Steele Lab. Tori will be heading to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to continue her studies in Mechanical Engineering.