Conor J. Walsh

Research Statement

AI generated · 3d ago

Conor J. Walsh's research centers on soft wearable robotics for restoring and augmenting human movement. His most-cited work includes a soft robotic glove for combined assistance and at-home hand rehabilitation (1,626 citations), which helped establish the wearable soft-robotics paradigm, and models of soft fiber-reinforced bending actuators that gave the field a design framework for programming actuator motion. He has extended this to clinical translation, including a soft robotic exosuit that improves walking in patients after stroke and human-in-the-loop optimization of hip assistance during walking, alongside a portable exosuit for reducing the metabolic cost of walking and running. Beyond these, Walsh contributed to pneumatic networks for rapidly actuating soft robots and to automatic design of fiber-reinforced soft actuators for trajectory matching, both reflecting his interest in computational design tools for soft systems. His work with David J. Mooney on ultra-sensitive, resilient compliant strain gauges for soft machines points to the sensing side of the same program. No software, datasets, or patents are indexed beyond his publications. Taken together, the arc runs from actuator modeling and fabrication through wearable sensing toward clinically validated assistive devices.

Most Cited Works

A soft robotic exosuit improves walking in patients after stroke

Louis N Awad, Jaehyun Bae, Kathleen O'Donnell, Stefano M M De Rossi, Kathryn Hendron, Lizeth H Sloot, Pawel Kudzia, Stephen Allen, Kenneth G Holt, Terry D Ellis, Conor J Walsh

Science Translational Medicine2017

672Citations

Human-in-the-loop optimization of hip assistance with a soft exosuit during walking

Ye Ding, Myunghee Kim, Scott Kuindersma, Conor J Walsh

Research Areas

Prosthetics and Rehabilitation RoboticsSoft Robotics and ApplicationsMuscle activation and electromyography sStroke Rehabilitation and RecoveryLower Extremity Biomechanics and Patholo

Affiliations & Education

Education

2005–2012
Massachusetts Institute of Technology(US)
M.S. · Mechanical Engineering
2018
Trinity College Dublin(IE)
B.S. · Mechanical Engineering

Employment

2018–2026
Harvard University(US)
Paul A. Maeder Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences · School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

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