Rice University InterDepartmental Excellence Award

Rice University’s InterDisciplinary Excellence Awards (IDEA) promote the development of new research or academic partnerships that extend across multiple schools to engage faculty in new and creative scholarship. A minimum of three faculty extending across at least two schools is required.

These awards are for high-risk/high-reward proposals. It is expected that these awards will lead to proposals that generate new centers or multi-PI programming.

Awards are funded up to a maximum of $75,000 and may extend for up to two years ($75,000 total).

Engineering and the Humanities

To investigate the 'human' side of human-robot interactions, the MAHI Lab is looking to collaborators beyond engineering disciplines to improve the work we do. With Dr. Marcia Brennan in the Department of Religion, we are making connections to the deeply personal nature of injury, impairment, and rehabilitation to better understand the participants in our studies. Working as a literary artist, Dr.

Computational Neurorehabilitation

Robotic exoskeletons can be effective tools for providing repetitive and high dose rehabilitation therapy. However, currently there is a lack of techniques to design therapy systematically using the myriad of subject-specific experimental data that is available from these devices. We envision an objective and systematic approach that combines experimental data with computational simulations for designing robot-assisted rehabilitation therapies.

Real-Time Myoelectric Control of an Elbow-Wrist Exoskeleton

Electromyographic (EMG) control interfaces have the potential to increase the effectiveness and accessibility of rehabilitation robotics to a larger population of impaired individuals, including those with no residual motion in their upper limb. Building on our previous work to characterize the surface EMG patterns of able-bodied and incomplete spinal cord injury (iSCI) subjects, we have developed a real-time controller for the MAHI EXO-II upper limb exoskeleton.