March 25, 2025
CREATE faculty member Kim Ingraham designs personalized, adaptive control strategies for assistive robotic devices, such as exoskeletons and powered wheelchairs for people with disabilities. Her work aims to optimize and customize the technologies by making sure humans are in the device control and feedback loop.
“Historically we have studied the way humans naturally move and then we have built robots that can mimic that movement,” says Ingraham, an assistant professor in the UW’s Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) department. “But when the human is wearing the robot and they’re both in the control loop at the same time, we have to figure out ways for those systems to successfully interact. Understanding and designing for the complexity of the interactions is one of the big gaps that we still have to address,” Ingraham says.
To help close these sorts of knowledge gaps, better understand how robotic assistance impacts human motion and, ultimately, to design better device controllers, Ingraham also works with augmentative devices, such as exoskeletons for non-disabled people. Ingraham co-authored a paper in the journal Nature (September 2024) that explores over a decade of scientific research in the field and draws from her doctoral research estimating energy cost using wearable sensors and including human preference as an evaluation metric for assistive robots.
Ingraham helps UW ECE doctoral student Zijie Jin put on a Biomotum SPARK ankle exoskeleton for an experiment in the UW Amplifying Movement & Performance Lab. This experiment is designed to help better understand how robotic assistance from an exoskeleton affects how participants walk, how much energy they consume, and how they feel while using the device.
Long, and continuing, collaboration with CREATE
From 2021 to 2023 and before she joined the ECE faculty, Ingraham was a CREATE postdoctoral fellow, mentored by CREATE associate directors Katherine M. Steele (Mechanical Engineering) and Heather Feldner (Rehabilitation Medicine).
Ingraham continues to work with Feldner, studying how early access to powered mobility devices impacts development, language, and movement in young children. And she is a core faculty member in Steele’s Amplifying Movement & Performance Lab that designs adaptive algorithms for exoskeletons.
As director of the Ingraham Lab, Ingraham mentors CREATE students, currently working with CREATE Ph.D. students Annika Pfister and Siena Villancio-Wolter, both in ECE.
“From a scientific perspective, I’m really interested in understanding how humans and wearable robots co-adapt to each other,” Ingraham said. “From a human point of view, I would really like to achieve the translation of our research into robotic systems that help people in meaningful ways — systems that can be adapted, personalized, and give people more choices in how they move around the world.”
This article was excerpted from a December 2024 ECE News article by Wayne Gillam.