It is common for patients that experienced a stroke to be affected by a loss in hand functionality afterward. Despite extensive physical therapy, many are never able to regain the same hand-functioning abilities to accomplish their daily activities. Dr. Gang Hua, of the Stevens Institute of Technology, tackles fundamental problems in computer vision, from both the algorithms and systems perspective, to enable technologies and systems that facilitate transforming the massive amount of unstructured real-world visual data into structured knowledge. In this way, Dr. Hua’s research builds technologies that can benefit people in their daily lives. By focusing on computational models where he and his team can intelligently coordinate software or robots, Dr. Hua allows people to collaborate with technology for improved health outcomes.

More exciting than the incredible innovation behind Dr. Hua’s technologies is the way his work is truly centered around the people the technologies aim to serve. His team, including five Ph.D. students and researchers that collaborate from other research institutes, are passionate about work that will have the greatest impact upon patient populations in need of technology’s assistance. Dr. Hua takes on the challenges of intelligently creating, understanding, managing, searching, visualizing, and interacting with the gigantic amount of data available to us and employing it to facilitate communication and social networking among users. While addressing such challenges requires a deep understanding of the problems Dr. Hua has recognized that it can also result in solutions that generalize to other related common problems. This opportunity to inspire technologies that can have direct implications on patients now and inspire future technologies for the health of our future continues to motivate Dr. Hua towards compassion-driven and patient-centered science.

Current research includes:

• Hand Rehabilitation: The project on hand modeling, in support of hand rehabilitation, will produce technologies that will bring personalized hand rehabilitation therapy to patients with paretic hands, such as those produced from a brain stroke. Another project, entitled "Egocentric 3D vision glasses for modeling hand rehabilitation" is also in its preliminary investigation stage in Dr. Hua’s group. The objective of this project is to research a computer vision based cyber-physical systems centered around a pair of egocentric 3D vision glasses, to analyze users’ hand motion in their daily activities through non-invasive vision based sensing.

• Co-Robot Wheelchair Project: Dr. Hua is researching the key enabling technologies in computer vision and machine learning for an egocentric vision based active learning co-robot wheelchair system to improve the quality of life for individuals that are older or disabled with limited hand functionality or no hand functionality who therefore rely upon wheelchairs for mobility. Using a pair of egocentric camera glasses, the wheelchair is able to actively solicit controls from the user when uncertainty is too high for autonomous operation, but also facilitates the robotic wheelchair system to learn from the solicited user controls. This way, the wheelchair system is able to evolve itself and is capable of handling more complicated environments in the future. When finished, this project is likely to enhance the quality of life for the 1% of our population who rely upon wheelchairs each day for their mobility.