Mark Price

Click through for a link to our dataset from this experiment, if you're interested in gait data from a novel asymmetry perturbation.

Results from our first adjustable stiffness treadmill gait adaptation study have been published in the Journal of Neurophysiology! We found some interesting force and muscle activity aftereffects that indicate changes in weight-bearing and push-off strategy.

doi.org/10.1152/jn.0...

For anyone following me on here - I started a new job at MIT! After studying and working at UMass Amherst for 10 years (!), today I have officially started my new position as a postdoc with Nidhi Seethapathi. Excited for this new chapter and to be nearer to all my Boston friends and colleagues!

Adjustable Compliance Footwear Technology to Investigate Gait Adaptation Kinetic asymmetries in gait caused by neurological impairments are a major factor in mobility deficiency. Gait perturbation training has shown promise for rehabilitating neurological gait asymmetry, b...

We just put up a preprint detailing the design of this new hardware, take a look for more details: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The main benefit of these is that we can study ground stiffness perturbations on a fully instrumented treadmill, as well as conduct experiments overground. I'm hoping to share results from a study investigating adaptation to a stiffness perturbation applied by these shoes very soon!

At maximum stiffness, they behave like tall platforms. At minimum stiffness, they are very squishy and dissipative as air flows in and out of the exhaust valve. We detect the sole deflection with embedded Hall effect sensors.

These are a set of tall soft outsoles that strap to the bottom of a normal pair of shoes, with a soft 3D-printed air pocket beneath the forefoot and hindfoot that we pressurize from a wearable air tank. The air pressure level beneath each foot is controlled remotely with an RF keyfob.

To create an overground counterpart to the AdjuSST, I've been working on making adjustable compliance footwear. Introducing Adjustable Compliance Footwear Technology (AcFT):

Last year I announced a preprint for a new adjustable surface stiffness treadmill, the AdjuSST - that paper is live on IEEE Xplore: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/108...

We've been getting some interesting findings from experiments we've been doing on this treadmill, so look out for those soon!

I realize I've yet to actually post here yet, so to give you an idea of what I'm doing, I'll announce some papers we have coming out. Lately I've been focused on gait adaptation to asymmetric perturbations, which means I've had to build some things to allow us to actually create those perturbations.

I am actively recruiting several PhD students to join my lab at UMass Amherst (you can apply as ME, BME, or CICS) to work on wearable robotics for walking/running and neuromotor control (primitives for action generation and perception)! Shoot me an email if you're interested!