Human-Machine Systems for Physical Rehabilitation

Cleveland State University, Cleveland OH

Investigators

Abstract

There is a compelling national need for advanced research to develop technology for people with disabilities. Some of the most vexing challenges include rehabilitating sensorimotor coordination to prevent falls, restoring motor function after paralysis, and regenerating muscle after traumatic injuries. Despite the development of impressive devices, people with disabilities abandon assistive technologies at alarmingly high rates largely because their perspectives are not included in the development process. Assistive technology is increasingly more intertwined in a web of human, ethical, legal, psychological, and social factors. Meanwhile, disability groups seek to participate in the research process to shed light on these issues. Against this background, graduate engineering education to date has been largely isolated from the complexity of disabled persons’ experiences, from rehabilitation therapy education, and from fields examining the larger impacts of disability and technology in the community. Moreover, traditional discipline-specific training inhibits transdisciplinary thinking that can lead to versatile rehabilitative technologies. To address these shortcomings in graduate education, this NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) project will create a graduate traineeship program that equips students to work on transdisciplinary research teams that successfully partner with people with disabilities to develop rehabilitation and assistive technologies. The training program will: develop courses to teach skills for spanning perspectives in human-machine systems, create a community that immerses students in multiple facets of disability, and test a model that promotes research-inspired collaborative teaching across disciplines. The significance of the program is that it will produce a traineeship model for engineers, psychologists, and urban experts to collaborate with therapy professionals and the disability community to deliver technology for the most complex rehabilitation challenges that people with disabilities use in their daily lives. The project anticipates training 20 PhD and 10 MS students, including 15 funded trainees, from Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, Exercise Science, Experimental Psychology, and Urban Studies. Trainees will participate on three transdisciplinary teams that will include people with lived disability experience according to the Integrated Knowledge Translation Principles for teaming with the disability community. Three objectives guide the project team's work. First is to create physical human-machine interaction technologies that improve individuals’ abilities to access, engage with, and manipulate their physical, social, and sensory environments. Second is to understand human processing and communication and develop artificial processing and communication to allow people with limited sensorimotor function to engage in meaningful activities (e.g., self-feeding, grooming, cooking) in realistic environments. Third is to develop therapeutic agents that are engineered to treat organ defects at a cellular and tissue level. This novel, human-centered traineeship model will include users in design, development, and implementation of technologies, while expanding students’ mindsets and skills to work interactively towards these goals. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.