Towards Personalizing Assistive Technology in the Real World

About this event

Patrick Slade - Harvard University

Assistive technology offers promise to improve personal mobility for hundreds of millions of people. However, determining how to assist people to accommodate their unique mobility needs during everyday activities is an open challenge. Methods for personalizing assistance to each user have helped systematically improve mobility outcomes in laboratory settings but are difficult to extend beyond the laboratory. This talk outlines a vision to advance assistance personalization methods and robotic technology for enhancing mobility in everyday settings, with specific applications for patient populations. This work merges advances across fundamental biomechanical science to understand people’s movement goals and needs, engineering development to create real-world assistance optimization methods, and translational studies to address specific patient population challenges.

Patrick Slade is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Harvard University. He received his bachelor’s at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed his M.Sc., Ph.D., and postdoctoral studies at Stanford University. He leads Harvard Slade Lab that combines robotics, biomechanics, and human-centered AI to build intelligent health models and assistive devices. His work explores how to understand the biomechanics of mobility-related challenges and personalize technology to improve people’s independence. Dr. Slade's work has been recognized for both mentorship (Everett I. Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring) and innovation (Forbes, MIT Technology Review, Amazon Robotics).