For most, buttoning up a shirt is a simple task, one requiring little active thought as the mind is occupied by other tasks to get ready for the day. But for those who no longer have full use of their limbs - from stroke, spinal cord injury or another cause - the connection between brain and body that allows for this daily action is missing and, often, independence along with it.
As a young undergraduate mechanical engineering student at Tsinghua University in China, Xiaogang Hu was drawn to the assistive technologies that could help restore movement for these people. In a research group, he learned he had a knack for asking the right questions, too.
"I asked the principal investigator of the lab, 'What is the major problem in assistive robots used for rehabilitation? What are we missing?'" said Hu, now the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Neurorehabilitation and an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State. "The response was, 'We don't really understand well enough how biological systems work, and this knowledge gap blocks effective communications between biological systems and engineered assistive systems.'"
This answer inspired Hu to set out to solve the field's overarching problem, while keeping the people who needed the solutions at the center of his work.
