My primary research interest is in error compensation in human-machine interfaces. This work has involved measurement of tremor and non-tremor errors in motion in disabled and healthy individuals. Most recently, I have completed a study quantifying low-frequency position errors in microsurgery. Adaptive tremor canceling This continuing work began as my dissertation research at Johns Hopkins University. Pathological tremor greatly degrades manual control of motion.
Physiological tremor causes imprecision in fine motor tasks such as microsurgery.
I developed a new adaptive filter to perform adaptive noise canceling of tremor in human-machine interfaces. This work may be thought of as a superset of the adaptive tremor canceling work. Tremor is not the only source of manual position error. Hand motion during manipulation contains considerable low-frequency error, or drift. Suppressing this error is difficult because it overlaps in frequency with voluntary motion.