Our research focuses on enabling effective rehabilitation outside the clinic, such as in one's own home, by altering the fundamental human dynamics to affect a beneficial change in the cognitive perception of human motion. Effective home-based rehabilitation is essential to meet the rising demand of physical therapy after stroke while simultaneously reducing the costs of care. In pursuit of home-based rehabilitation, we aim to determine the relationship between externally altering an individual's physical parameters to the resulting motions, determine a minimal set of physical parameters needed to appropriately alter an individual's walking and reaching abilities, and to examine how an individual's altered dynamics can affect permanent cognitive changes that transfer to real-world tasks.

The overarching goal of this research is to enable cost-effective rehabilitation for use at home. Past research shows that time spent training is the most important factor in restoring motion after a neurological injury, but adequate home-use rehabilitation is not currently available. The proposed research will enable technology that will increase the availability of rehabilitation while simultaneously reducing the cost of rehabilitation by reducing the number of clinic visits. Throughout much of this research, we collaborate with neurophysiologists and physical therapists.

Our experience in engineering, haptics, human-robot interaction, rehabilitation, and medical robotics is well suited to determine the underlying features needed to enable effective home-based rehabilitation. This research will advance our understanding of asymmetric walking, bimanual interactions, and the physical interactions between physical therapists and patients, which will benefit research in humanoid robotics and teleoperation while expanding research possibilities in the areas of diagnostic tools and suggesting new prosthetic and orthotic designs.

REED Lab photo taken in the Summer of 2011.