SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will benefit the 30 million disabled survivors of stroke, spinal cord injury, and traumatic brain injury around the globe. Making assistive robots more affordable and easy to use is important for this market, projected to grow to $1.2 billion in 2024. The proposed wearable technology will enable effective communication and control of robots designed to assist patients with activities of daily living, which will help patients improve quality of life, lower costs for long-term care, and preserve physical and mental health with increased activities. The data may be used to monitor rehabilitation and deterioration progress, which could encourage patients to exercise more frequently and enable more personalized treatment.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will explore the feasibility of commercializing a lightweight and compact optical sensor band for detecting commands from disabled users and controlling assistive robots. Most commercially available human-robot interface options are not practical or reliable for chronic hemiparetic patients due to the diverse and evolving patient conditions. The research objective involves designing an optical sensor array to capture muscle activities and developing an adaptive muscle synergy-based classification algorithm to convert optical data to user command. The project will optimize the configuration for near-infrared emitters and phototransistors to efficiently monitor muscle activities on the forearm. Advanced signal processing and machine learning techniques will be used to filter the data collected from multimodal sensor inputs to ensure robust performance regardless of user conditions.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.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to benefit more than 200 million people around the globe who are currently living with limb loss or impairment. With the rapid growth of an aging population and longer life expectancies, assistive technologies that can improve the independence and self-sufficiency of people, enabling them stay in their homes longer, are urgently needed. The proposed wearable sensor will be a step towards making robots designed to assist in activities of daily living more effective, affordable, and easy to use. In addition to empowering people to achieve higher levels of functionality and quality of life, this sensor may also further the fundamental understanding of physiological changes as manifested in hemodynamic patterns, which could be used to better monitor patient status and allow clinicians, as well as assistive device manufacturers, to develop more personalized and mindful solutions. _x000D_