Wearable sensing for human motor control research and mobility assistive devices: Capturing environmental features

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Motivated by the challenges of  nearly 3 million Canadians living with a mobility disability, this proposal seeks funding to advance wearable sensing methods to automatically acquire key environmental information of the physical environment, and to investigate the utility of integrating context-aware control for mobility assistive devices (mAD). While the potential benefits of emerging mAD (e.g., exoskeletons, robotic walkers, advanced prosthetics) to facilitate mobility have received significant attention, their uptake and utility remain limited. A common barrier to effectiveness of mAD are limitations in overcoming real-world environmental obstacles with minimal risk for falls. The underlying hypothesis of the proposed research theorizes that incorporating data on presence (and proximity) of environmental features will advance the effectiveness of target mAD and wearable sensing applications in facilitating safe mobility. Initial research objectives are aimed at developing a taxonomy of environmental features related to adaptive mobility, and evaluating candidate sensing imaging modalities to meet technical and feasibility requirements. Following multimodal data collection and annotation activities, machine vision algorithms will be generated to automatically detect mobility features, as defined by the taxonomy. To examine utility, these new capabilities will be integrated and tested in exemplar mAD and wearable sensing applications. Achieving the proposed research objectives will generate foundational knowledge in characterizing environmental features for mobility, develop new wearable sensing capabilities, and examine utility of context-aware automated control of legged and wheeled mAD. While a major motivation of the research is to advance mAD, the outcomes of the proposed research are expected to impact human motor control research by providing new tools to investigate free-living phenomena from an ecological perspective. The deliverables of this basic research program, such as new sensor kits, algorithms, and datasets, afford a new lens to examine and measure human-environment mobility interactions. By providing enhanced context-aware analyses, these fundamental developments are expected to attract industry and health research partners for applied research. This research will benefit Canadian businesses designing assistive technologies (e.g., Bionik Laboratories, Able Innovations, Trexo Robotics) and other markets related to mobility (e.g., mobile robotics, augmented reality, rehabilitation services) through commercialization opportunities, tool development, and training of highly qualified personnel (HQP). By investing in the training of 14 HQP (10 undergraduate, 2 Master's, and 2 Doctoral students), this research program will directly support the development of Canadian expertise in this field.