Saad Y
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at University of Texas Austin (UT Austin)
Expertise
Mechanical Engineering, Rehabilitation Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, Surgical Robotics, Design for Wearable Devices
Bio
Hi! I'm currently a PhD student in the ReNeu Robotics Lab at UT Austin focusing on studying physical human-robot interaction in wearable devices. My research integrates knowledge of underlying human soft tissue properties to design more ergonomic and effective attachment mechanisms for wearable robots. My goal is to enable the next generation of wearable devices to seamlessly integrate with the human user and advance the use of robots in rehabilitation, daily assistance, human augmentation, and virtual reality. Alongside my graduate studies, I love watching sports such as basketball and baseball and I enjoy recreationally playing sports such as tennis, squash, and volleyball. I'm always down to try a new place to eat with friends or hunker down for a fun board game night. I find that a good social balance makes the graduate school experience that much more enjoyable.Project ideas
Design of an Upper Body Exoskeleton for Rehabilitation
Robots are increasingly being used in medicine, and a growing application is rehabilitation after neuromuscular injury such as stroke. The design of an exoskeleton starts with analysis of the underlying human muscoloskeletal structure to inform the design of the robot's kinematic linkages. Considering the complexity of the human upper-body, it is best to focus on a specific subset of human degrees of freedom (ie: shoulder motion, elbow flexion/extension, etc). This choice should be motivated by which human joints are relevant to the impairments caused by the neuromuscular injury in question. Once the structure of the exoskeleton is formulated, kinematic and kinetic analysis must be performed to assess how well the wearable robot will interact with a user and if it's suitable for use in a rehabilitation environment.
Enabling the Meta-Verse: A Virtual Reality Environment for Wearable Robots
The pairing of virtual reality (VR) with wearable devices will advance the adoption of the meta-verse in daily life. Wearable robotic devices provide many advantages for VR such as the fine application of forces to the human user and the accurate measurement of position and force data from the human-robot interaction. The possibilities are endless for virtual environments which can be paired with wearable devices to create an amazing user experience. The VR environment can be developed in a physics platform such as Unity and integrated with an existing wearable robotic device, either in simulation or in real life.