Investigating relationships between human-exosystem adaptation and baseline psycho-motor tests to improve system fluency
Aditi Gupta
PhD Student, Medical Engineering & Medical Physics (MEMP)
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology
Individuals’ ability to adapt and learn to use an exosystem vary widely, even within healthy populations. The reasons for this are unknown and could stem from differences in cognitive, perceptual, or motor factors. It is necessary to gain an understanding of the underlying reasons behind varying adaptability to exosystems to improve fluency of the human-exosystem team. Fluency as a construct is used in the field of human-robot interaction to evaluate the effectiveness of a human-robot team. It is possible to improve fluency by perturbing the robot, which in this case is the exosystem, or by perturbing the human. This work will focus on improving fluency by perturbing the human through methods such as feedback provision during use or creating training paradigms to augment adaptation and learning. The specific method of implementing strategies for improving fluency will be informed by individuals’ performance on cognitive, perceptual and motor tasks and how that relates to their subsequent adaptation to a lower-extremity exosystem.