Professor He (Helen) Huang, North Carolina State University, answers our questions about her work and Cambridge University Press’s new journal Wearable Technologies.

 

 

 

What first attracted you to the field of wearable technologies?
I have always been passionate about developing wearable machines to improve quality of life for individuals with physical disabilities. I was fortunate to conduct related research throughout my academic training. In my pre-doctoral training, I worked with an inter-disciplinary team to develop a wearable robotic arm and a virtual reality system for stroke rehabilitation. In my post-doctoral training, my research was to enable individuals with limb amputations to intuitively operate their robotic upper- or lower-limb prostheses via developing novel neural-machine interfaces.

 

What are you currently working on that you’d like to tell us about?
In a big picture, I am interested in science, computing, and engineering related to wearer-robot symbiosis. That is, holistically treating a human wearer and their wearable robot as one system; they are physically connected and function together. Of course, this is a huge topic that requires multiple disciplines and a research community to work together. Under this topic, my lab focuses on neural-machine interfaces for robotic upper and lower limb prostheses, wearer-robot interaction and co-adaptation, as well as translation of our research and technology to assist the motor function of individuals with motor deficits. More details about my lab’s research can be found on my lab website https://nrel.web.unc.edu/research/

 

What do you think the journal Wearable Technologies will bring to the field?
Many fields, such as electronics, actuators, materials, batteries, control and systems, neuroscience and engineering, medicine, etc., are addressing wearable technologies and their applications. However, to my knowledge, the related publications are scattered across journals in different fields. I think Wearable Technologies offers a common ground for the research community to share the state-of-the-art research in each subfield that can foster more collaborations across disciplines, accelerate the research progress, and increase the research impact to society.

 

What are some of the challenges facing the field today?
Based on my expertise, I would say information processing capability (both algorithms and hardware). Wearable technologies become meaningful only if meaningful information can be captured by the machine, no matter it is used for a monitoring purpose or closed-loop control purpose.
For wearable machines that also need to act on human wearers, control design that can deal with human variations, safety, preferences, environmental uncertainty, and versatile task contexts is still challenging.

 

In which areas of the wearable technologies field do you expect to see growth in the next five to ten years?
My answer will be all the areas.

 

Why should authors publish in Wearable Technologies?
The journal can reach out to multi-disciplinary readers in wearable technologies, ranging from scientists and engineers in fundamental research to researchers in various application domains. In addition, the editorial board has committed to provide fast and high-quality peer review process. Although the journal is new, I am confident that the journal will become a flagship journal in the field of wearables.