About GEAR
GEAR is a collaborative research effort between the University of Delaware and Johns Hopkins University that brings together robotics engineers, cognitive scientists, and physical therapists, for the purpose of designing new rehabilitation environments and methods for young children with mobility disorders.
The envisioned pediatric rehabilitation environment consists of a portable harness system intended to partially compensate for body weight and facilitate the children’s mobility within a 10 x 10 feet area, a small humanoid robot that socially interact with subjects trying to engage with them in games designed to make them maintain particular levels of physical activity, and a network of cameras capturing and identifying the motion in the environment and informing the robot so that the latter adjusts its behavior depending on that of the child.
The realization of this system presents unique new research challenges in the fields of pediatric rehabilitation, robot control, machine vision, and computational learning.
More information about the project and some insight behind the methods used can be found @ UDaily Article.
GEAR Events Calendar
Meet the Robots!
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This is NAO, a humanoid robot. NAO plays with the toys in the environment to actively engage children in different activities. Find out more about NAO @ SoftBank Robotics |
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This is Dash, a wheeled robot featuring lights and sounds to grab a child’s attention. Dash loves playing tag with the children. Find out more about Dash @ Wonder Workshop |
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This is Dot, a stationary robot. Dot uses a ring of LED lights to interact with children from the top soft play stairs. Find out more about Dot @ Wonder Workshop |
