REU/ELEVATE SUMMER PROJECTS 2023

Description: Student will be contributing to the development of the flexible control authority assistive dialogue system for a robotic arm. The system tracks the user state within a kitchen task allowing the Veteran to initiate control authority (user control versus robotic arm control) at any point in a task. The student can work on a variety of aspects of the project: automatic sequencing of kinesthetic robot arm movement examples, development of a hierarchical hidden Markov model for robot arm state identification, development of an interactive dialogue for querying user when requesting additional robot assistance, development of the user interface for interacting with the system, architectural software enhancements of the autonomous control, etc.

Students will aid in data collection and analysis of wearable sensor data to determine the effects of commercial in wheel suspension systems to standard spoked wheels on reducing vibration. Additionally, students will aid in setting up a mobility course, preparing wheelchairs and wheels, monitoring MWU during activities for safety, and prepping ADL activities. Furthermore, students will aid in the development of machine learning classification models to identify levels of risk from raw wearable sensor data.

Description: Daily mobility has a significant impact on one’s ability to participate in the home and community. The purpose of this project is to use accelerometer-based data to characterize daily mobility for individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) acutely after injury while they are still in the hospital and through their first year following injury. An improved understanding of mobility patterns will enable clinicians to better target interventions for walking and wheeling following SCI.

Description: For many people with disabilities, especially people with spinal cord injury (SCI), travel is still challenging and sometimes impossible. Public transportation is relatively cheaper but can be unreliable and un-accommodating. Paratransit is convenient, but it is relatively more expensive than public transportation and requires scheduling ahead of time. A personal vehicle is also fast and convenient; however, it is expensive to have their own wheelchair-accessible vehicle. Therefore, the project will develop a board game – “You Can’t Get There from Here” -- to address the travel barriers for people with SCI and to improve the awareness of community members, including healthcare providers, clinicians, and system operators/designers. 

Description: Airline travel is extremely challenging or impossible for some people with spinal cord injury (SCI) using powered wheelchairs due to structural limitations including tight aisles, lack of a seating area with a docking station for powered wheelchairs, and inaccessible laboratories in the cabin. They could fly in an airplane seat; however, flying in a passenger seat can be uncomfortable, painful, injurious, and sometimes impossible for them, and service use is limited due to in-cabin seating and mobility limitations. Since airline travel is important for accessing specialized healthcare, aspects of education or employment, for leisure, and for staying connected with friends and family, changes are needed to enable people with SCI to use airline services in a safe and reasonable manner. Therefore, this project will be conducted to identify the pent-up demand, needs, pain points, and potential solutions/alternatives of people with SCI using powered wheelchairs to use commercial airline services.

Description: Manual tilt-in-space wheelchairs are used to provide mobility to children and adults with complex disabilities who are unable to propel a manual wheelchair or do not have access to a powered wheelchair that they can operate. HERL has developed a novel, patent pending, process for design of wheelchairs integrating concepts of Kirigami. This project will include design and possibly fabrication of a new manual tilt-in-space wheelchair.

Description: Pressure injuries (PI) are all too common among powered wheelchair users. In many people with neurological injuries PI reoccur and require surgery, and unfortunately these surgeries are often unsuccessful. HERL has developed a patent pending seating system for powered wheelchairs to help address this challenge. This project will entail fabrication and bench testing of this novel system.

Description: The Human Engineering Research Laboratories will celebrate its 30^th year in 2023. Over this timeframe, HERL has made life-changing contributions to science, invention, and education transforming the lives of Veterans and People with Disabilities. These remarkable achievements and the people impacted are to be documented in this “coffee table” book to be created as part of this project. The goal is to summarize the people, technologies, and breakthroughs produced by HERL … and to provide a glimpse in the things to come.

Description: Little is known about how many people with disabilities submit patents or how many patents are awarded to people with disabilities. Moreover, there is a paucity of data on the types of disabilities of patent applicants and patent holders, where do they live (i.e., zip code, state), type of organization that they work for or independent inventor, number of co-inventors. The project is to contact inventors who have had a patent or patent application published in the USPTO database in the previous five calendar years (2018-2022). The project would entail contacting via mail, e-mail, or social media inventors with a patent or patent application published in the USPTO database in the previous five calendar years (2018-2022) and ask them to complete a brief on-line survey. Survey results would be analyzed to determine % PWD among respondents, and their demographics.

Description: The project will consist of 3D scanning of different models of minivans and related components to determine the key dimensions for a robotic wheelchair to be developed and transported in a minimally modified vehicle. After the 3D scanning is completed, the data will be converted into a 3D CAD image to determine the key dimensions for designing of the robotic wheelchair.

Description: The goal of this project is to determine the seating mounting bracket strength or load capacity of current minivans. Tasks include weighing the vehicle seats, testing the strength of the vehicle seat mounting brackets, and calculating the forces experienced by the mounting brackets during a crash. The results of the analysis will help determine the maximum weight of the robotic wheelchair.

Description: Iteratively develop, optimize, and evaluate the Active Permeable Pressure Relieving Dynamic Seating System (APPRDSS) for improving PI in-home treatment by the integration of novel modular seat and back support coordinated with power seat functions. Multiple prototypes will be iteratively designed and built for evaluation. Two prototypes will be built for evaluation. We will utilize a participatory action design and engineering (PADE) approach to incorporate end-user and clinician knowledge and perspective throughout the design process. We will conduct in-lab clinical testing of APPRDSS using PwSCI and expert clinicians by comparing it to a ROHO cushion and backrest to drive further improvements in the APPRDSS.

Description: Pressure injuries affect 2.5 million Americans every year, and approximately 60,000 die from pressure injuries each year. Their primary cause is blocked blood flow in the capillaries of the person’s dermis from excessive and prolonged pressure at certain contact points in bed. People with mobility limitations are at greatest risk of acquiring pressure injuries. The current hospital protocol for preventing such injuries is to turn a person in bed every two hours. This not only disturbs and awakens the individual but also causes maceration due to shear on the person’s often fragile and sensitive skin. There are several alternating pressure and low air loss mattress products that exist commercially but have several limitations including lack of air-permeation, loud noise, air leakage issues, power consumption round the clock and these mattresses are not segmented/undulated enough and are not backed by enough evidence to deserve a strong recommendation. We will perform user evaluations of pressure relieving cushions and mattresses to assess interface pressure, usability, workload, comfort, satisfaction, and temperature profiles for determining tissue ischemia or inflammation.

Description: When an individual cannot safely or effectively move from one surface to another, a caregiver may need to perform an assisted transfer to move the care recipient. However, performing assisted transfers can be detrimental to both the caregiver and user, especially if the caregiver is an informal or untrained caregiver who may not have been taught how to perform a transfer safely and effectively. A new instrument, called the Caregiver Assisted Transfer Technique Instrument (CATT) has been developed to provide an objective way to evaluate proper technique of caregivers who provide transfer assistance to individuals with spinal cord injury/dysfunction. This project will focus on validating the CATT’s ability to evaluate assisted transfer techniques through motion capture analysis and analysis using wearable, portable sensors. The student will assist with human subjects testing of caregivers to determine the validity of the CATT and will participate in data collection, analysis, and interpretation of human subjects’ data. They will also work with the research team to validate a portable wearable sensor set up, including electromyographical sensors, pressure insoles, and inertial measurement units, by comparing it with traditional motion capture.

Description:  Wheelchairs are an important interface between individuals with disabilities and their environment. For people with mobility impairments the wheelchair is a necessary step to social participation. In 2016, 63.8% of wheelchair users reported wheelchair breakdown over a 6-month period. These failures resulted in users being stranded, missing work or school, or missing a medical appointment. To date, all this data has been collected retrospectively, meaning users are asked to recall breakdowns in the last 6-months. This study collected repair data in real-time using an app. Users reported when breakdowns happened as well as when steps in the repair process happened and consequences they experienced while waiting for the repair. Additionally, we collected GPS data that will allow us to understand the impact of the usage on breakdowns. An important outcome of this project will be temporal data about the repair process that can be used for advocating for changes in policy related to wheelchair repairs.

Description: This project will expose the student to ultrasound imaging and scanning the Posterior Tibial Nerve to measure cross-sectional area at three specified locations proximal to the ankle. Participants will complete an activities survey and will be divided into two groups based on activity level for data analysis. Descriptive statistics will be computed for the sociodemographic variables and correlations will be used to compare activity level with size measure of nerve.