Project Listing--Please review p

Project Listing

Please review projects below. Use the numbers above each project to rank your top 3 choices by designated section on application.

Program Name:

ASPIRE

Name of Project:

Investigation of Transfer Techniques to Minimize Shoulder Joint Loading

Project Description:

It is well established that individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) have a high prevalence of repetitive strain injuries

of the shoulder and wrist. These injuries are believed to be caused by overuse of the upper extremities. Mobility,

transfers and pressure relief maneuvers are a large part of the daily life of individuals with SCI. Literature sources on

upper extremity pain among individuals with SCI indicate transfers as a primary reason for the pain. However, there

is a lack of research that identifies the most effective and safest way to perform a transfer activity. The purpose of

this study is to conduct a biomechanical analysis of transfers to determine transfer techniques which may help to

preserve upper limb function and maintain independence with transfers’ overtime.

Program Name:

ASPIRE

Name of Project:

Foot and Hand propulsion

Project Description:

Understand what happens in the skin tissue when a person is using hands and feet to propel a wheelchair, using

different types of wheelchair seat cushions.

Program Name:

ASPIRE

Name of Project:

Time-frequency analysis of sacral skin perfusion signal under different stimuli

Project Description:

Our research team have established a lab setting to test skin perfusion (blood flow) response under different stimuli,

including localized pressure, temperature and shear force. The skin perfusion response contains different frequency

components, and it is of interest to decompose the skin perfusion signal into frequency domain to understand the

underlying mechanisms of the vasomotion (vascular smooth muscle motion) under different stimuli. The student will

have the hands-on experience on human subject testing for collecting skin perfusion data under localized pressure

in combination with different temperature and/or shear force. The student will also have hands-on experience with

different types of time-frequency signal analysis of the data collected. Based on the 10-week training the student will

have the ability to conduct human subject testing, perform different time-frequency analysis method of the skin

perfusion signal, and to write an extended abstract for the scientific conference.

Program Name:

ASPIRE

Name of Project:

Development of a Virtual Job Coach for Veterans with TBI

Project Description:

This grant will develop and evaluate a Virtual Job Coach (VJC), a novel, computer-based method of delivering

multimedia guidance to workers while engaged in assembly tasks. The VJC is intended to meet the cognitive needs

of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) who are frequently unable to sustain competitive employment due to

distractibility, inappropriate demeanor and difficulties remembering and following instructions. The VJC is

essentially an occupational teleprompter; analogous to the text teleprompter used by public speakers.

Program Name:

ASPIRE

Name of Project:

Realistic wheelchair modeling

Project Description:

Power wheelchairs are a primary source of mobility for some people with significant physical disabilities. However,

not all who need a power wheelchair can drive it safely, and many individuals fail clinical assessments and are

never prescribed a device because of constraints in assessment time in the clinic. Our long term objective is to

develop a realistic and safe virtual assessment and training environment similar to a typical driving simulator. This

project will focus on the realistic modeling of a wheelchair's real world driving behavior in a virtual environment. Real

world data will be captured using systems like the VICON motion capture system and accelerometers. Advanced

modeling tools will be used to convert that data it into a virtual model. The student will have an opportunity to work

with cutting edge software and hardware tools to develop a virtual model of a wheelchair that will be used in an

actual research protocol. The student should preferably have some knowledge/experience with at least one software

programming language. Please mention this experience in your essay/statement of purpose.

Program Name:

ASPIRE

Name of Project:

Modeling time series clinical data

Project Description:

Cytokine clinical data is to be modeled as a multivariate time series, and used as predictor for patient survival. The

modeling involves Chebyshev orthogonal polynomial extraction as polynomial time trends and used as input

variables for a logistic model regarding survival.

Program Name:

ASPIRE

Name of Project:

Analysis of the Wheelchair Testing Database

Project Description:

The wheelchair testing database contains information about wheelchairs that have been tested at HERL over the

past several years. It contains manufacturer information and the results of double-drum, curb drop, static impact,

environmental, and other tests. One field of the database is the wheelchair's "K code," which classifies the chair as

standard, lightweight, ultralight, basic power, specialty power, pediatric, etc. In many entries of the database, this

field is blank. However, it is a very important piece of information that can allow us to compare the performance of

similar chairs.

Program Name:

ASPIRE

Name of Project:

Effects of handrim technology on upper extremity musculoskeletal injury

Project Description:

The goals of the study include: Determine differences in EMG and metabolic responses for wheelchair propulsion

with standard handrims, the Natural-Fit Handrim and the FlexRim.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

R1 - Empowering the User to Improve the Travel Chain

Project Description:

This research will identify effective "citizen science" methods to engage riders with disabilities and others in

improving public transportation accessibility by documenting and assessing problems and good solutions

throughout the system. The goal is to empower riders, resulting in a greater understanding of the transportation

system, and improve the feedback loop between rider and provider.

The specific experiment scheduled for this spring/summer involves assessments of what types of multimedia data

end users should collect during citizen science efforts to improve transit accessibility. The experiment will be run in

the lab using simulated physical spaces. Participants in this study will be wheeled mobility users and college

students.

See http://www.rercapt.org for more detail.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Diagnosis of cognitive impairments

Project Description:

We are interested in collecting data about how elders perform different everyday tasks. By analyzing this data over

time, we can detect changes in cognitive ability. We will be deploying sensing technologies for collecting data

about how elders take medicine, use the phone, etc. and filter this data for only the most salient information. Then,

we will develop novel interactive visualizations that can be presented to various stakeholders: elders, caregivers,

occupational therapists and physicians, for the purpose of understanding cognitive changes.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Improving elder driving routes

Project Description:

We have developed a novel technology that can learn the preferences of drivers (in terms of the kinds of roads they

prefer to drive on) in different situations (weather, time of day, traffic conditions). We are interested in developing a

web-based system and a phone based system that will allow elders to use this technology to get driving directions

that best match the way they prefer to drive.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Evaluation of Activity Monitors in People with Spinal Cord Injury

Project Description:

The aim of this project is to will explore the utility of activity monitors to assess energy expenditure among manual

wheelchair users with Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) during varying modes and intensities of physical activity. As part of the

research experience you will be exposed to testing and data analysis of activity monitors during various exercises.

Data analysis will be conducted by comparing outputs of the activity monitors with metabolic data on the targeted

physical activities.

Students depending on their interest will be encouraged to build new devices or develop new algorithms to estimate

energy expenditure for different physical activities. The goal is to provide an effective tool to gauge physical activity

and to monitor interventions that aim at meeting the physical activity recommendations among manual wheelchair

users with SCI.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Remote Accessibility Assessment

Project Description:

The objective of this study is to determine the effectiveness of our remote accessibility assessment system (RAAS)

in evaluating the built environments of wheeled mobility device users. Network-based protocols for remote

accessibility assessment will be developed using state-of-the-art technologies in the RAAS such as virtual reality,

VRML/X3D, XML, photogrammetry, videoconferencing, and remote imaging. We will evaluate the effectiveness of our

new method by examining agreement between assessment results obtained using the RAAS and a conventional in

person (CIP) method.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Coaching Strategies for the Seating Virtual Coach

Project Description:

The seating virtual coach will be an intelligent reminder and coach. The purpose of having this device is to tune the

power seat function users’ behaviors to be responsible for their schedule to perform pressure relief positioning and

make the best use of the seat functions. (Power Seat Functions are electrical powered features of a wheelchair

seating system. These functions include tilt-in-space, recline, elevating legrests, and seat elevation) We would like

to have an intern to collect information and knowledge about coaching/prompting strategies, and plan and conduct a

mock trial with the personnel of HERL for teasing out better strategies for the seating virtual coach project.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Chronic Web

Project Description:

We are exploring how social media can impact the experience of chronic illness on the web. Our project involves two

components: A study of how social media and trust inter-relate and impact treatment choices in the context of lyme

disease (A highly controversial illness); and the development of a social media site to help those with chronic

illness track symptoms, discuss symptoms and treatment strategies, and so on.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Automatically Adapting Graphical User Interfaces to Pointing Problems

Project Description:

Computer technology has become an integral component in people’s lives for employment, recreation, and

socializing. Unfortunately, computers are not universally accessible and there is a growing population of people who

are motivated to use computers, but find it physically difficult to do so. One of the main reasons computers are

inaccessible is that they treat all users the same, and usually do not know much about each user.

This is particularly unfortunate given the amount of accessibility software that comes pre-installed on most

computers or is available online including pointer configuration utilities, screen magnifiers, and onscreen keyboards.

Not only do most users not know what technology they need to make a computer accessible, insurance limitations

and high cost can prevent them from having an assistive technology clinician assess their ability. As a result, it is

not uncommon for people to end up using either no accessibility tools, or tools that are not suited for their pointing

abilities.

I am working to build computer systems that are able to assess a user’s current performance characteristics and

automatically adapt to them. While this research has the possibility to affect many people, I am focusing on making

computers more accessible to individuals with motor impairments using a mouse. Some of the technical problems I

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Sensing the environment

Project Description:

The goal of the project is to develop new approaches to sensing, such as "inside-out" vision in which the system

experiences the environment and the user's behavior from the user's point of view, thus facilitating the analysis of her

behavior and intentions. Information from the vision system will be combined with multiple other sensors to develop

a robust system for identification of human actions.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Database of human activities from a fusion of multiple sensors and semantical information

Project Description:

The goal of this project is to collect a large dataset of daily activities such as cooking and to make the dataset freely

available on the web for experiments in activity recognition and monitoring. The dataset includes video and audio

from multiple locations in the space as well as a body-worn camera and audio recording device, accelerometers,

RFID tags, and motion capture data as ground truth. To design learning algorithms which are able to generate

sensible interpretations of sensor data and correct predictions of users behavior and motion we will also like to

incorporate semantical information about the environment using robust semantics databases.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Sports Data Logger

Project Description:

The Sports Data Logger is a device that will log wheel rotations of a manual wheelchair for sports applications.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Design of an encoder system for an Electric Powered Wheelchair

Project Description:

Algorithms for Electric Powered Wheelchairs (EPWs) have seen little improvement in the past 20 years. They fail to

take into consideration many factors that can affect the EPW’s performance such as ground surface condition,

drivetrain, and user’s mass. The replacement of these algorithms with advanced control systems will lead to

improved EPW performance in several ways. In my project I worked on the design of various components associated

with encoders, which were essential for the functioning of algorithms developed to improve traction control. I

designed a caster wheel axle, an encoder cover, a two-gear system, and a slip ring capsule holder, most of which

have had very positive results after incorporation of the first prototype. But a few issues remain unsolved at the end of

my internship, the most significant of which is the failure of a strong correlation between the caster and rear wheel

velocities. Development of new components or design features will likely be needed in the near future to fix the

problem.

Activities:

The following activities were engaged by the student: literature review, mechanical design, machining, programming

and data collection as well as weekly meetings.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Development of Electrical Powered Wheelchair Control Interfaces

Project Description:

Review current control interfaces available for EPW users. Test at least three of the new interfaces that have been

developed for the PerMMA project such as, traditional joystick, isometric joystick, track ball, switch, and etc. Design

and fabricate a universal mounting system to easily attach and use these different control interfaces according to

users’ requirements. If time permits, test-drive the EPW with the different control interfaces to determine the pros and

cons of each and possibly develop a recommendation for clinical selection of the appropriate interface for a user

based on their functional capability.

Program Name:

QoLT

Name of Project:

Building and Testing a Smart Controller for Electrical Powered Wheelchairs

Project Description:

Review current smart wheelchair literature to gain an understanding of the state of the development. Review current

HERL Smart Controller design for possible modifications. Fabricate a Smart Controller based on these

modifications. Design and fabricate a universal mounting system so the Smart Controller can be attached to many

different types of wheelchairs. Bench test and field test Smart Controller to verify that all components are operating

correctly.

Program Name:

ASPIRE

Name of Project:

Advanced Athletics Field Events Chair

Project Description:

The goal of this project is to prototype a new design for an athletics throwing chair (shot put, discus and javelin).

The student will be responsible for taking an existing conceptual drawing and refining into manufacturing drawing.

They will also ensure the design complies with international competition rules. Upon completion of the drawings

the student with work with the graduate student and the shop staff to complete the fabrication.

Activities:

The student will be engage fully engaged in the design process. The student will complete solid models,

participate in design reviews, attend weekly meeting, and prototype designs using HERL's extensive fabrication

facilities. The student will also be expected to document all work, including a final RESNA conference style paper.