CAREER: Improving Prosthesis Usability through Enhanced Touch Feedback and Intelligent Control

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will support research that contributes to the knowledge needed to improve the functional usability of upper-limb prostheses, thereby promoting the progress of science, advancing national health, and securing national defense. Upper-limb prostheses are artificial limbs used to replace someone’s natural limb after limb amputation.

These limbs are often motorized, featuring hands and fingers that move much like our natural hands and fingers. Unfortunately, these devices do not provide the wearer with haptic (touch-based) information. Haptic information is essential for many tasks, such as picking up an egg without cracking it, closing a resealable bag, or drinking from a plastic cup.

This award supports fundamental research needed to develop a new type of prosthesis that intelligently interacts with the world like our natural limbs and provides wearers with haptic information of those interactions. This new prosthesis will interpret the wearers’ task intent and assist the wearer in accomplishing tasks with minimal mental effort.

Improving the usability of prostheses will ultimately lead to a better quality of life for individuals experiencing limb loss, including military veterans. Likewise, the knowledge gained through this research will prove beneficial to other types of assistive devices, allowing more individuals to return to the workforce after injury. Therefore, results from this research will benefit the US economy and society.

This research involves several disciplines, including mechanical design, electronics, control theory, biomedicine, and robotics. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the research will broaden participation amongst the engineers, scientists, and physicians developing assistive technologies and those in society who directly or indirectly benefit from these technologies.

Dexterous manipulation with our upper-limbs originates from a hierarchical control scheme in which task intent is converted to operational motor actions in the peripheral limbs that appropriately tune the limb’s mechanical impedance to accomplish the task goals, all while haptic feedback from the limb is used to track task progress and refine the motor plan. Achieving comparable dexterous control capabilities with an upper-limb prosthesis requires a robust understanding of the appropriate means by which this hierarchical control scheme can be extended out through the prosthesis to the environment.

This research seeks to fill this knowledge gap through investigations into intelligent control that will enable an amputee to perform dexterous tasks considered infeasible with current prosthesis technology. The research team will utilize data-driven approaches to model task intent from physiological and environmental interaction measures and derive and empirically validate impedance control and haptic feedback strategies that adapt to the amputee’s intent and the context of the task being performed.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.