Human Robot Systems Lab

Advancing the accessibility and efficacy of neuromotor rehabilitation requires new technology that enables robust and accurate measurements of human behavior during everyday activities in real-world conditions. Equipped with such data, clinicians can make more informed decisions on treatment based on factors such as the observance of undesirable compensatory strategies, changes in behavior due disease progression or injury recovery, level of active engagement, and the use and efficacy of an assistive device. To meet this need, the overall goal of our project is to enable a Mini-Cheetah quadruped robot to autonomously measure whole body human kinematics during walking in real-world environments with high accuracy and reliability. To this end, the proposed project aims to complete the following: (1) advance a Mini-Cheetah robot to be a mobile sensing system that can autonomously follow and measure the kinematics of a human during their daily activities; and (2) quantify the accuracy and reliability of human kinematic measurements from the mobile sensing system during walking experiments conducted in real-world (outdoor and indoor) environments. Successful completion of the aims will result novel and validated tool to measure human kinematics in real-world conditions that will have broad relevance in rehabilitation practice and research.

This project was funded by a Pilot Project Award from the Restore Center at Stanford University (co-PIs: Huber and Kim).