Richard Fineman, fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, has ambitions to not only advance human health and medicine, but also progress spacesuit design.
During experiments, Fineman was able to calculate a patient’s falling potential based on movement data gathered by cameras and computers. The study’s participants were fashioned with wearable sensors as they completed a variety of tasks. Their movements were tracked, analyzed, and processed to define fall risk potentials.
After calculating human motion as it relates to Earth, Fineman was curious about motion within other environments.
“How does human motion change in altered gravity environments?” asks Fineman. “I think about how spacesuits are these big bulky objects…Each suit has to be fit to the human, but we don’t really have objective ways to determine how well the suit fits.”
Thanks to Fineman being a member of Assistant Professor Leia Stirling’s group in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, he had access to a spacesuit for experiments.
Applying a series of wearable sensors, Fineman developed a technique to evaluate and improve the way the spacesuit fits on astronauts.
To learn more about this development, watch the video below.