8 accepted papers
There is increasing evidence of the role of compromised mediolateral balance in falls and the need for rehabilitation specifically focused on mediolateral direction for various populations with motor deficits. To address this need, we have developed a neurorehabilitation platform by integrating a we…
Maintaining balance during gait in the mediolateral direction requires more active motor control than in the anteroposterior direction. Step width modulation is a key strategy used by healthy individuals to achieve mediolateral walking balance, but it can be disrupted in populations with poor sensor…
Human-in-the-loop (HIL) optimization usually optimizes assistive torque of exoskeletons to minimize the human's energetic expenditure in walking, quantified by metabolic cost. This formulation can, however, result in altered gait pattern of the human joint from the natural pattern, which is undesire…
Existing robotic lower-limb prostheses use autonomous control to address cyclic, locomotive tasks, but are inadequate in adapting to variations in non-cyclic and unpredictable tasks. This study aims to address this challenge by designing a novel electromyography (EMG)-driven musculoskeletal model fo…
Powered exoskeletons are promising devices to improve the walking patterns of people with neurological impairments. Providing personalized external assistance though is challenging due to uncertainties and the time-varying nature of human-robot interaction. Recently, human-in-the-loop (HIL) optimiza
Understanding how human ankle mechanics are modulated when walking on various ground surfaces (e.g., soft and unstable ground surfaces) would help the development of controllers of lower extremity robots (e.g., prostheses and exoskeletons) mimicking human ankle behaviors. With this goal in mind, thi
The tuning process for a robotic prosthesis is a challenging and time-consuming task both for users and clinicians. An automatic tuning approach using reinforcement learning (RL) has been developed for a knee prosthesis to address the challenges of manual tuning methods. The algorithm tunes the opti…
This paper presents a novel multi-axis robotic platform for the characterization of two important neuromuscular properties of the human ankle: mechanical impedance and reflex responses. The platform is capable of producing highly accurate position perturbations up to an angular speed of 200°/s and e…