Last year's milestones

(and next year's plans)

November 13, 2024

It's been a while since I updated this page, so here's a summary of what I've been doing in 2024.

5 new papers (3 are preprints):

Gait adaptation to asymmetric hip stiffness applied by a robotic exoskeleton - Published in IEEE TNSRE, we present our full gait adaptation study to asymmetric joint stiffness applied by our hip exoskeleton with n=13 participants. We're excited by this because we are seeing adaptations similar to those elicited by split-belt treadmills, meaning we could potentially translate this into a gait training intervention overground.
NSF DARE—transforming modeling in neurorehabilitation: a patient-in-the-loop framework - The fellows from the NSF DARE conference held at USC last year put together this perspective article highlighting the state of the art and future directions for translating modeling research into patient-centered clinical tools.
AdjuSST: An Adjustable Surface Stiffness Treadmill (preprint) - The detailed mechanical design and evaluation of our adjustable stiffness treadmill. We will be using this to study perturbed human locomotion.
Forward Simulations of Walking on Surfaces with Asymmetric Mechanical Impedance: Insights for Gait Rehabilitation (preprint) - Simulation work I did to determine some design targets for the AdjuSST. Predictive simulations of gait show some interesting trends when changing stiffness and damping of the ground surface interface under one foot, including the reversal of the direction of asymmetry for many measures.
A Sagittal Planar Ankle-Foot Prosthesis with Powered Plantarflexion and Socket Alignment (preprint) - A long overdue article that contains the definitive design and evaluation of the powered ankle-foot prosthesis I developed as part of my PhD work. I think this paper contains some interesting insights about translating predictive simulations of gait into real functional prototypes.

3 conference presentations:

New England Muscle and Molecular Motors Meeting, Amherst, MA. June 20-21, 2024.
- Title: "Energetic Consequences of Ground Interface Asymmetry – Two Gait
Simulation Studies"
American Society of Biomechanics Annual Meeting, Madison, WI. August 5-8, 2024.
- Title: “Robotic Footwear for Real-Time Control of Foot-Ground Stiffness”
Northeast Robotics Colloquium, Amherst, MA. September 28, 2024.
- Title: "Effects of Changing Foot-Ground Stiffness on Standing Weight Bearing Asymmetry"

K99 award proposal submitted to the NIA. Fingers crossed.

Plans for 2025: Look out for the first studies from the adjustable stiffness shoes and treadmill projects to be published. I am actively looking for faculty positions, so with any luck, this site will begin transitioning toward becoming my lab website.