Fall 2026 GRASP SFI: Patrick Slade, Harvard University, “Towards Personalizing Assistive Technology in the Real World”

Assistive technology offers promise to improve personal mobility for hundreds of millions of people. However, determining how to assist people to accommodate their unique needs across everyday mobility scenarios is an open challenge. Personalizing assistance to each user has helped meet these needs and systematically improve mobility outcomes in laboratory settings. To address these challenges, our group performs biomechanical studies to understand people’s movement goals and needs, develops real-world personalization methods, and applies these findings to assist patient populations including people post-stroke, people with knee osteoarthritis, and people with blindness.