APT Center Investigator Dr. Sandra Hnat Receives $217,000 Career Development Award from VA RR&D
Dr. Sandra Hnat, an Investigator at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center's (LSCVAMC) Advanced Platform Technology (APT) Center, received a $217,000, two-year Career Development Award – Panel 1 (CDA-1) from the Department of Veterans Affairs entitled "Investigating Fall Mitigation Strategies when Walking with an Exoskeleton for Users with Lower-Limb Paralysis”. The overall goal of this project is to address the absence of safety features that prevent falling for Veterans with paralysis due to spinal cord injury (SCI) while they are wearing an exoskeleton outside of monitored environments, such as in a user’s home or community settings. Currently, commercial exoskeletons have FDA 510(k) clearances that require continuous contact guarding or stand-by-assistance by a spotter. During instances of falling, these devices are only designed to enter joint-locking configurations and require the user to balance themselves via crutches, a walker, or intervention from a caregiver to prevent impact with the ground.
To help resolve these issues, Dr. Hnat and her study team will design controllers for a hybrid exoskeleton that detect destabilizations and prevent falls from occurring by achieving two specific aims: 1) developing an algorithm that predicts and classifies the magnitude and direction of an incipient fall using center of mass kinematics and 2) identifying the exoskeletal configurations that minimize the magnitudes and locations of impact forces on the user and applying this information to design a controller that reconfigures the exoskeleton’s joint angles into these safer configurations.
The study will involve able-bodied walking experiments under the effect of treadmill perturbations, optimizations of 3D musculoskeletal modeling to discover safer falling positions, and conducting falling experiments with a crash-test dummy to verify simulation results. The new controller will be validated in real-time in a repeated set of experiments with able-bodied participants and will be immediately translatable into a hybrid neuroprosthesis for Veterans with SCI.
Congratulations to Dr. Hnat on this career milestone!
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Dr. Hnat’s team of dedicated mentor’s include:
Ronald Triolo, PhD, Executive Director, APT Center, Louis Stokes Cleveland VAMC; Senior Research Career Scientist, Department of Veterans Affairs; Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University; Program Director, T32 Training Program for Musculoskeletal Research
Musa Audu, PhD, APT Center Investigator, Louis Stokes Cleveland VAMC; Research Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University
Roger Quinn, PhD, APT Center Investigator, Louis Stokes Cleveland VAMC; Arthur P. Armington Professor of Engineering, Case Western Reserve University; Director, Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory (BIRL)
Raviraj Nataraj, PhD, Director, Movement Control Rehabilitation (MOCORE) Laboratory and Assistant Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology
Robert Gregg, PhD, Director, Locomotor Control Systems Laboratory and Associate Professor, University of Michigan
James Wilson, DO, PM&R Physician, MetroHealth Rehabilitation Institute
Mark Grabiner, PhD , former director of the Clinical Biomechanics and Rehabilitation Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago
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