Travel: Improving the Utility of Haptic Feedback in Upper-Limb Prosthesis Control: Establishing user-centric guidelines for engineering innovation

This award will provide partial travel support for U.S. participants to attend the 2023 IEEE World Haptics Conference, which will take place July 10-13, 2023, in Delft, The Netherlands. There is a divide between the reality of upper limb prostheses and the needs of prosthesis users, in terms of usability, reliability and cost. To help bridge this divide, the U.S. participants are organizing a workshop on “Improving the Utility of Haptic Feedback in Upper-Limb Prosthesis Control: Establishing User-Centric Guidelines for Engineering Innovation” at the 2023 IEEE World Haptics Conference, a premier international venue for exchanging ideas and innovations related to haptic (touch-based) technology. This workshop will bring together prosthesis users and prosthesis researchers to create guidelines for future research. Attendees will hear from leading researchers in the field, and actual prosthesis users, and will have an opportunity to engage in conversations that help shape the future of prosthesis technology. The goal of this travel support is to broaden participation in this workshop beyond established researchers, to include both prosthesis users and student researchers who may not have the research funds to support their own travel. The U.S. attendees include five prosthesis users, three prosthesis researchers, ten student researchers, and four workshop organizers. The outcome of this workshop will be a set of guiding principles that can be used by researchers in the community when designing future haptic feedback technologies for prosthesis use. In addition, these guidelines will be used to create a core set of study outcomes that can be used by researchers to standardize future research, and by clinicians and prosthesis users to compare and interpret future research advances. Priority consideration for student travel grants will be given to women and minority students. Workshop outcomes will be disseminated through the workshop website https://sites.google.com/gcloud.utah.edu/2023-whc-workshop/home. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.