Design of Devices for Human Movement Assistance

Abstract

Various forms of physical devices are being explored to assist human movement such as for walking, standing balance or reaching tasks. These devices can take the form of robots, wearables or even morphing environment beyond the form of traditional machines. In order to maximize benefit and minimize potential adverse effects, the design of such devices must be based heavily on the current understanding of the biomechanics underlying the human movement in question. And often, it falls to the hands of the engineer to fill in the gaps and turn them into quantifiable engineering requirements. This talk will present a number of engineering projects where the motivation to assist human movement led to revisiting or establishing new hypotheses in biomechanics of human movement. I will discuss examples that span from simple literature review to developing a new instrument solely for the purpose of conducting a novel human experiment as a prerequisite for future assistive robot designs. Possible areas of collaboration within the campus on biomedical devices will also be discussed.

Bio

Dr. Yun Seong Song is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology (formerly University of Missouri Rolla). He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and B.S.E. in Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in 2004, his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. He was a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in 2012-13 and a postdoc and lecturer at Georgia Tech Biomedical Engineering in 2014-16. Dr. Song’s work and interest include physical human-robot interaction and rehabilitation robotics, and their applications in understanding the human biomechanics.