BME graduate student Michael Paskett was awarded a prestigious F31 graduate fellowship from the National Institute of Health. The NIH F31 program enables promising predoctoral students with potential to develop into productive, independent research scientists to conduct dissertation research while receiving mentored research training in their graduate student career.
Congratulations, Michael!
Michael performs his graduate research in the BME laboratories of Greg Clark and David Warren. Read more about Michael’s research below:
Recent advancements in prosthetic limbs and neural interfaces can restore the sense of touch and utilize advanced algorithms for highly intuitive prosthesis control, nearing a seamless integration of man and machine. Although these advances generally improve user performance in commonly used metrics for control, the effort required to achieve such performance is often overlooked, where a large reduction in effort is likely preferable to a small performance enhancement. In this project, we aim to establish robust measures of effort (cognitive load), adapted from other fields, that can be used to inform patient-centric design of prosthetic systems and to quantify potential benefits of sensory feedback and long-term use in reducing cognitive load for controlling an advanced dexterous and sensorized prosthetic arm after transradial amputation in humans.