Jonathan Realmuto
University of California-Riverside, CA·Engineering
When you pick up a cup or push open a door, your arm does not just move — it continuously adjusts how stiff or compliant each joint is, so that contact with the object goes smoothly. Wearable robots meant to help people with movement disorders sit alongside the joints and must do the same, but they are limited by what today's actuators and controllers can do: motors able to modulate stiffness quickly tend to be heavy, expensive and awkward to wear.
- Fields
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
wearable robotics
exoskeleton
soft actuators
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Design soft robotic actuators whose passive mechanical properties enable direct impedance modulation — control of joint stiffness and compliance — drawing on muscle topology, for upper-limb wearable robots arranged parallel to the joints.
- Build proprioceptive reflex loops, fast local feedback inspired by the body's sense of limb position, that actively modulate wearable robot impedance within the constraints of a body-mounted device.
- Develop human-in-the-loop controllers that regulate robot impedance from wearer signals read through a non-invasive neural interface, so assistance tracks user intention during physical interaction with objects.
- Evaluate prototype wearable robots in human experiments with motor-impaired and neurotypical participants, testing effects on muscle coordination, skill acquisition and object manipulation with and without robotic assistance.
More about the research
This project develops upper-limb wearable robots that take their design cues from biology, aiming for devices that are comfortable, low-cost and powerful enough for daily use, with a particular focus on pediatric movement impairment such as cerebral palsy, the most common cause of serious physical disability in childhood.
Why it matters
Upper-limb wearable robots could become a daily-use treatment rather than a laboratory curiosity for people with cerebral palsy and other mobility impairments, expanding how independently they can perform everyday tasks. Lower-cost, high-power soft actuators and intention-aware controllers would also be adaptable to assisting older adults and to physically demanding work in manufacturing and nursing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jeremy Brown
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Speed up how robotic-surgery trainees learn to judge tissue forces by sight, by giving them titrated extra haptic feedback of tool–tissue forces and contact vibrations in user studies.
Myunghee Kim
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Build and evaluate a personalized robotic prosthesis for people with below-knee amputations that combines adaptive optimization with biofeedback so assistance adjusts in real time to each user's movement patterns.
Aaron Young
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Compare personalized hip versus ankle exoskeleton assistance for improving walking on both legs after stroke, testing the hypothesis that hip assistance yields larger walking-speed gains because stroke survivors compensate at the hip for ankle weakness.
The school
University of California-Riverside: 21 labs on PI Pages, $232M a year on research, 328 research doctorates a year.
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