Engineering a better way to eat

In the Cab lab right now, we're basically a human robot interaction collaboration lab. Specifically what we're working on is assistive feeding. There are almost 2 million Americans who need assistance every day when eating. Since the 1970s, companies have been trying to develop assistive eating devices. One of the main limitations is that they struggle to actually pick up the food robustly. Like, if it's just this exact type of food and just this exact place, sure they pick it up, but as you know, you eat all different types of foods, and they're mixed in different sizes. And so people often don't use the system for very long because they can't eat consistently. We thought instead of continuing to try and make the robot act like a human, is there any kind of adaptation we can add to the robot to make it easier? Made a spoon, and we're calling it cure spoon. It looks a lot like a normal spoon, but really what it is, it's a mechanical device that changes the curvature of the spoon. So in a relaxed state, it looks and behaves just like a normal spoon. But when we actuate it, pinches to hold food within the curry spoon. Throughout our process over the past year, we had two experimental phases, and both times we took our utensil to the Virginia home. They're actually leading the project. They're telling us I like this. I don't like that. Can you change it in this way? You know, we've been working with the stakeholders, these adults with mobility limitations to make sure we have a system built for them. But who's building it? We've got two undergraduate students. Both of which are mechanical engineering juniors, Casey and Brandon. We've got one graduate student, Maya, who's been leading this project, and then a postdoctoral scholar, Haram, who's kind of helped me direct the team. So they've been involved in kind of the whole process of that design, manufacture and testing. You know, I think it really shows kind of what we're about as Virginia Tech mechanical engineers. It's engineering. It's the students, and it's also the stakeholders, the people that it's for.