Senior biomedical engineering major Andrew Hoffmaster has won a $500 award for a paper he wrote about designing robotic hands to help rehabilitate stroke patients.
The Brookeville, Md., native was awarded first place in an annual academic paper competition of the District of Columbia Council of Engineering and Architectural Societies (DCCEAS).
"This award recognizes the quality design work our students are doing which incorporates design, fabrication, and device testing," said Binh Q. Tran, assistant dean in the School of Engineering and chair of the biomedical engineering department. " Obviously, it is an honor to have our student recognized amongst his peers at other prestigious institutions."
Among the universities that belong to the DCCEAS are Georgetown University, George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and Howard University.
Hoffmaster's winning paper was titled "Bilateral Exoskeleton Stroke Therapy," a 4,000-word version of a longer thesis he submitted last fall for his senior design project. The paper was edited by Andrew Gravunder, a senior engineering major from Piqua, Ohio.
Gravunder and Hoffmaster worked together on the senior design project. Since the contest rules stipulated that each academic paper be entered in the competition by a single student, Gravunder and Hoffmaster agreed that Hoffmaster would be the one.
The winning paper showed the possibility of designing and building an affordable, in-home, robotic-controlled system that opens and closes the impaired hand of a stroke victim.
Traditional therapy for stroke patients focuses solely on the impaired hand: A patient puts the hand in a robotic-controlled glove, which enables her to flex her palm and fingers, said Sang Wook Lee, assistant professor of biomedical engineering who advised Hoffmaster and Gravunder.
By contrast, Hoffmaster's paper argues for the importance of using both hands to rehabilitate the impaired hand - an approach called bimanual or bilateral therapy.
A stroke patient would put each of her hands in a polypropylene glove, and the robotic-controlled gloves would force both the normal and impaired hand to flex. As a result, "the patient's brain would be rewired," said Hoffmaster. "The unaffected part of the brain would take over from the affected part of the brain the functioning of the impaired hand."
Lee, whose research interests include the biomechanics of hand extremity and rehabilitation of neurologically impaired patients, presented Hoffmaster and Gravunder with the idea of designing and building a robotic glove for their senior design project.
The students' innovation, Lee said, "was combining the exoskeleton glove and the bimanual therapy. Experts in 100 countries are doing studies about how gloves can help stroke victims, but using this with bimanual therapy is a pretty neat idea."
Gravunder came up with the idea of using a bimanual approach to the gloves. "There was not any flash of insight. It took a long period of time," he said. "I was doing a literature search and saw that bimanual therapy [without gloves] is practiced by some stroke patients but not most. Then I thought about using that approach with the gloves."
Hoffmaster said he is working on a glove made of aluminum instead of plastic that allows a patient to flex individual fingers rather than four fingers simultaneously.
Hoffmaster will receive his award at the DCCEAS Awards Banquet in Silver Spring, Md. on Feb. 26. He intends to share half of his prize with Gravunder.
DCCEAS helps engineering, architectural, and technically related organizations in the Washington region render public service and advance the professions through public interest, scientific, and educational pursuits, according to the council's website.
