Riley Bernas presents at the CNT 2024 Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

This summer, the Steele Lab hosted undergraduate researcher, Riley Bernas, from the University of Connecticut. Riley was mentored by Mia Hoffman, Heather Feldner, and Kat Steele.

She finished up her 10-week summer Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) by presenting at the 2024 Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium with the Center for Neurotechnology (CNT).

Riley gave a podium and poster presentation titled “Quantifying low-cost switch access play-kit usage in clinical settings: A first glance.“

Way to go, Riley!

ASB 2024 Recap

Steele Lab members, Charlotte Caskey, Victoria (Tori) Landrum, and Megan Ebers, attended the American Society of Biomechanics Annual Meeting (ASB) in Madison, WI from August 5-8, 2024.

Charlotte gave a poster presentation on the “Effect of spinal stimulation and interval treadmill training on gait mechanics in children with cerebral palsy”

Tori also gave a poster presentation on the “Impact of a Resistive Exoskeleton on Fatigue in Children with Cerebral Palsy”

Megan co-hosted a Symposia Session titled, “Can machine learning reveal the next generation of neural and biomechanical processes governing human movement?” with Steele Lab Alumni, Michael Rosenberg. In Megan’s talk, “A machine learning approach to quantify individual gait responses to ankle exoskeletons,” she discussed how neural network-based discrepancy modeling can be used to isolate the dynamics governing changes in gait with ankle exoskeletons.

KM Steele (2023) After Universal Design Book Chapter – “Shaping Inclusive and Equitable Makerspaces”

Book Chapter in After Universal Design: The Disability Design Revolution, Edited by Elizabeth Guffey

Makerspaces are often used to help build new assistive technology and increase accessibility; however, many of these spaces and tools remain inaccessible. We need to make sure disabled people can access these spaces and create the products and designs that they actually want.
– DO-IT Scholar

Dr. Steele was asked to contribute a case study focused on her work with AccessEngineering into Shaping Inclusive and Equitable Makerspaces.

Description: How might we develop products made with and by disabled users rather than for them? Could we change living and working spaces to make them accessible rather than designing products that “fix” disabilities? How can we grow our capabilities to make designs more “bespoke” to each individual? After Universal Design brings together scholars, practitioners, and disabled users and makers to consider these questions and to argue for the necessity of a new user-centered design.

As many YouTube videos demonstrate, disabled designers are not only fulfilling the grand promises of DIY design but are also questioning what constitutes meaningful design itself. By forcing a rethink of the top-down professionalized practice of Universal Design, which has dominated thinking and practice around design for disability for decades, this book models what inclusive design and social justice can look like as activism, academic research, and everyday life practices today.

With chapters, case studies, and interviews exploring questions of design and personal agency, hardware and spaces, the experiences of prosthetics’ users, conventional hearing aid devices designed to suit personal style, and ways of facilitating pain self-reporting, these essays expand our understanding of what counts as design by offering alternative narratives about creativity and making. Using critical perspectives on disability, race, and gender, this book allow us to understand how design often works in the real world and challenges us to rethink ideas of “inclusion” in design.

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.