Hosea Siu: That one time a robot rewired my nervous system | Designing for Assistive Technology

In this talk, Hosea will describe one perspective of the rough trajectory of how (he thinks) we got here, to a nationwide group of students getting ready to build awesome stuff to help people in everyday life*. Along the way, we’ll discuss an exoskeleton system that learned to anticipate its wearer’s intentions, and then changed the way Hosea's arm worked. We’ll talk about the various pieces of technology that enabled that system, from 3D printing and machine learning to electromyography and machine tools, and what they mean for assistive technology and design. Finally, we’ll look at the lessons learned since that project, and how you can use them to build more usable products than Hosea did.

This is the first talk in a series of talks hosted by Designing for Assistive Technology (D4AT) in an effort to educate others about assistive technology (AT).

D4AT is a multi-school collaboration, comprised of schools from California to New York, to create AT for people living with disabilities in our local community and educate students about disability and accessibility issues.

More about the speaker:
Hosea Siu is a research engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He has a bachelor’s, master’s and a PhD from MIT in aerospace engineering (bachelor’s, PhD) and planetary science (master’s). His current work focuses on building various components that may or may not make up Iron Man.