Asst. mechanical engineering professor earns NSF CAREER Award for telerehabilitation research
Published: Jul 16, 2024 4:30 PM
By Jeremy Henderson
Brendon Allen has some exoskeletons in his closet, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) wants to find out more about them.
The NSF recently tapped the assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering for a five-year $588,408, NSF CAREER Award aimed at increasing access to rehabilitation for individuals with movement disorders through a deep learning control framework for home-based hybrid exoskeletons.
"These devices combine functional electrical stimulation (FES) with actuated robots to provide personalized therapy," Allen said. "Shifting the computational demand from individual homes to clinicians' offices can, I believe, reduce the cost of telerehabilitation significantly.”
He also feels it can enhance the benefits.
"The dynamics of hybrid exoskeletons are inherently uncertain and nonlinear, and even in 2024, communication delays between the clinician's computer and the exoskeleton continue to complicate telerehabilitation," Allen said. "Those delays equal destabilization."
Allen feels that destabilization can be drastically decreased utilizing novel delay compensation and deep neural network (DNN) based methods to enable the remote control of the exoskeleton.
"Successful completion of this project could transform the rehabilitation industry," Allen said. "Not only will it make rehabilitation more accessible and affordable, but the control developments in this work will also improve centralized network control systems, impacting fields such as manufacturing, power grid automation, reconnaissance and search rescue operations.
"But my main priority in addressing the communication delays and uncertainties in robot dynamics is to bring personalized rehabilitation into the homes of those who need it most."
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