Myunghee Kim
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Most prosthetic legs give the same amount of help no matter who is wearing them or how they are moving that day. For someone with a below-knee amputation (BKA), that mismatch limits how well and how comfortably they walk.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
- Topics
wearable robotics
robotic prosthesis
below-knee amputation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Build and evaluate a personalized robotic prosthesis for people with below-knee amputations that combines adaptive optimization with biofeedback so assistance adjusts in real time to each user's movement patterns.
- Develop a coaching approach using verbal instruction and real-time visual feedback to help prosthesis users acquire and retain beneficial gait patterns while avoiding movements linked to long-term health problems.
- Apply multi-objective optimization to dynamically retune prosthesis performance as the user adapts, sustaining effective assistance throughout human-robot co-adaptation.
More about the research
This project asks whether a robotic prosthesis that keeps retuning itself to its wearer, while the wearer also adapts to the device, can meaningfully improve mobility and quality of life. The guiding premise is that continual personalization and this two-way, co-adaptive relationship will produce better outcomes than fixed assistance.
Why it matters
Prostheses that adapt continuously to the person wearing them could help people with below-knee amputations move more easily and avoid gait compensations that lead to joint problems and other long-term harm. The personalization, coaching and optimization methods developed could also carry over to wearable robots and assistive devices for a broader range of people living with mobility impairments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Aaron Young
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Compare personalized hip versus ankle exoskeleton assistance for improving walking on both legs after stroke, testing the hypothesis that hip assistance yields larger walking-speed gains because stroke survivors compensate at the hip for ankle weakness.
Jonathan Realmuto
University of California-Riverside, CA·Engineering
Design soft robotic actuators whose passive mechanical properties enable direct impedance modulation — control of joint stiffness and compliance — drawing on muscle topology, for upper-limb wearable robots arranged parallel to the joints.
Jeremy Brown
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Speed up how robotic-surgery trainees learn to judge tissue forces by sight, by giving them titrated extra haptic feedback of tool–tissue forces and contact vibrations in user studies.
The school
University of Illinois Chicago: 42 labs on PI Pages, $532M a year on research, 359 research doctorates a year.
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