Movement retraining has the potential for effectively treating musculoskeletal diseases and improving rehabilitation for clinical and sports applications. While movement retraining in controlled laboratory settings has shown promise, practical applications of portable movement retraining have not been achieved due to critical barriers in wearable hardware, sensing, real-time modeling, and haptic feedback, specifically: cumbersome and uncomfortable hardware, inaccurate sensing, lack of real-time functionality, and ineffective haptic feedback paradigms.

This project seeks to solve these problems by: 1) combining sensing and feedback in a small, comfortable package, 2) developing a wearable sensing framework for accurate human kinematics estimation, 3) modeling key kinematic, kinetic, and muscle force gait parameters in real-time, and 4) creating novel haptic feedback paradigms for fast and effective movement training. The goal of this project is to expand the scope and effectiveness of human movement training beyond systems tethered to the laboratory to extend health and lifestyle benefits to the general public. Results are expected to produce a movement retraining methodology and portable device platform prototype with wearable movement sensing, wearable haptic feedback, and real-time dynamic modeling.