Worked as research assistant under Prof. Damiano Zanotto on prototype of powered ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) project aiming to restore full functionality to victims of lower extremity injury and traumas

Worked on design and testing of a new portable actuation system for AFO, prioritizing function and ease of servicing, with the goal of achieving full passive range of motion while reducing setup times and maintenance times

• Designed/fabricated new cable spool and spool housing for actuation with the goal of increasing extremity range during gait cycle through increasing the number of full cable rotations while maintaining inner cable radius for torque calculations

  • Modeled spool in SolidWorks, pulling relevant dimensions from project files and adjusting model dimensions to increase number of full rotations of cable systems from 5 to 7

  • Fabricated new spool and altered original spool housing to accommodate new spool by extending active window - using lathe, mill and machine shop skills

• Created full functional model of portable cable system in Simulink SimScape MultiBody with the goal of finding optimal spring stiffness to minimize oscillation and maintain response times

  • Model pulls physical dimensions and experimental data from MATLAB file kept updated from project files

  • Created accurate and up-to-date documentation to ease transition after graduation, with the goal of a new grad student completely new to the project being able to operate model and change experimental values and measurements