Smart Step Research Assistant

Experiential Learning Application

Experiential Learning Category: Research

Summarize your proposed experiential learning activity, including the primary

focus of your activity, your intended actions, and the expectations of your
supervisor and/or organization/partners.

I will be serving as an undergraduate research assistant this summer for creating a

smart wearable device, "Smart Step," that helps people descend stairs easily and
intuitively. I will be helping to predict future foot placement during stair descent and
investigate how haptic cues affect the timing at which users would modify their foot
placement during ambulation. I will be assisting with research collection, as well as
data cleaning and analysis. I will help set up sensors to collect kinetics/kinematics
data of people walking downstairs, ll in missing data with approximations, and have
the opportunity to play around with the data we collect to see what is necessary for
making good predictions.

Explain how your activity demonstrates the values of the Honors Program
Experiential Learning area you selected. Rather than reiterating our de nition,
outline how your activity embodies this de nition.

In this project, I am volunteering to assist a UW Ph.D. student at Rombolabs with

research in prosthetics and engineering. This is a way for me to actively engage in my
own learning, especially as it will help me connect what I'm learning in my classes to
real-world applications that involve helping people and making their lives easier. I will
be volunteering at this lab for the entirety of summer quarter for approximately 15
hours per week.

How and why did you select this engagement? What skills or experiences do
you hope to gain from it?

I learned about this particular project through a fellow RSO member, and I proceeded
to look into the lab online. I found a lot of their projects intriguing, as they built on my
interest in neurobiology and connected it to tech in a really interesting and valuable
way. After meeting with the PhD student conducting the project to learn more about
what it consisted of and what assistance would be useful, I decided to I would love to
help out. I hope to learn more about the research process and how it can improve

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 people's everyday lives, what it's like to build a smart device, and more about
machine learning and data analysis.

How does this activity connect to your concurrent or past coursework? How
does it speak to your broader education goals and experiences?

What initially drew me to this lab and research project is how it connects to the body
control and ownership aspects of an intro neurobiology course I took last year.
Additionally, it provides me the opportunity to apply my Informatics coursework that
relates to data cleaning/analysis, which is what I would primarily be working on.
Furthermore, I am excited to explore machine learning and human-machine
interaction, as those are both aspects of careers that Informatics lends itself to that I
am not as familiar with but would like to learn about-particularly in a medical eld. In
these ways, this activity will both draw on my past coursework and help me develop a
deeper understanding of my career goals.

How will your activity contribute to the larger goals of the organization/your
partners?

This research project helps the us understand how humans sense their bodies and
the environment to control movement. Additionally, it allows us to apply this
understanding to improve mobility for people with lower limb amputation,
speci cally in terms of navigating stairs, by building a wearable device that delivers
sensory feedback. That is, this project will enhance the ability of people with lower
limb amputation to perform daily tasks seamlessly with the speci c goal of assisting
stair descent.

Estimated hours per week: 15

Estimated project start: 06/24/2019

Estimated project end: 08/23/2019

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