Friday, February 3, 2006
1:00pm – 2:00pm
Professor
Michael Peshkin
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Northwestern University
“Rehabilitation Robotics”
Abstract:
Robots have great potential in rehabilitation and physical medicine, owing to their tirelessness, cost efficiency and versatility. There is also potential for well intentioned but ill conceived devices that do not match medical or market needs, or do not meet the "cultural" needs of patients and care providers. I will relate my experiences leading a small company which was formed to conceive, design, build and bring into practice a robotic rehabilitation device. The talk will highlight themes in physical therapy, user- oriented design methodology, and human-interactive robotics.
Biography:
Michael Peshkin received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon in 1988. He is an inventor of "cobots" (collaborative robots, with Ed Colgate) and has been working in human- interactive aspects of robotics for many years. He is a founder of three companies, in image guided surgery (Z-KAT), materials handling (Cobotics), and rehabilitation robotics (Chicago PT). Other research interests include exercise robotics, haptic communication between people, and electromagnetic sensors.