Alexandra (Sasha) Voloshina
Seminar Information
Over 40 million people in the United States currently live with a mobility impairment. With this number expected to increase even further in the upcoming years, exoskeletons and active prostheses show promise as gait augmentation and rehabilitation tools. However, the highly unpredictable movement patterns of people with impairment, especially on natural surfaces, currently limit the efficacy of these robotic devices. In this seminar, we will discuss past research on evaluating healthy and impaired gait on uneven terrain, and recent work on systematically optimizing prosthesis and exoskeleton assistance for individuals with lower-limb amputation. We will consider the benefits of robotic interventions in patient populations and outline the critical issues that must be addressed to allow assistive devices to effectively restore locomotor function in individuals with gait impairment.
Alexandra Voloshina is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining UCI, she received her B.S.E. degree in Biomedical Engineering and Ph.D. degree in Kinesiology and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. She was then a postdoctoral scholar at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, followed by a second postdoctoral appointment at Stanford University. Her research lab focuses on work in the field of rehabilitation robotics, with the particular goal of improving user training and human-robot interactions for more effective robotic assistance during gait. She is the recipient of the NIH Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Engineering Career Development Award (2020).