We use balance perturbations to study how people maintain their balance (or not) while performing different tasks in which falls often occur in the real-world, such as standing, arising from a chair, walking, etc. Our suite of perturbations leverages human-device interactions and mechatronics to allow for precise and varied challenges to balance. These approaches allow us to gain insight into the muscle, tendon, sensory, and cognitive contributions to balance control and changes thereof due aging, disease, and injury.

You may be interested in working in this area if you are interested in: unraveling the neural control of balance; pushing people over and/or pulling the rug out from underneath them; designing new perturbation devices and their real-time control algorithms