Carnegie Mellon researchers develop customizable finger brace for injury recovery

Carnegie Mellon University

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A team in the Interactive Structures Lab developed a fully customizable finger brace that can easily switch from stiff to flexible with the push or flex of a finger. It can also be 3D printed and requires no assembly.

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Credit: Carnegie Mellon University

A friend's struggles with arthritis and the finger braces used to manage it inspired research by a Carnegie Mellon University student that could make it easier for patients to follow rehabilitation plans, speed up recovery times and help people manage chronic conditions.

Yuyu Lin, a Ph.D. student in the School of Computer Science's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), worked alongside her friend during an internship and noticed she had to remove the finger braces she wore to relieve arthritis in her knuckles when she used a computer. She couldn't bend her fingers with the braces, but she needed the braces to treat her condition. 

Lin wondered if she could make a finger brace that could easily toggle between stiff and flexible — without removal— to help people facing similar challenges.

With her colleagues in the Interactive Structures Lab (ISL), Lin did just that. The team developed a fully customizable finger brace that can, with the push or flex of a finger, easily switch from stiff to flexible. Along with its versatility, the brace can be 3D printed and requires no assembly.

"For this work, we were trying to think from the perspective of the patient, and how to get them to wear this brace and complete their rehabilitation routine more easily," Lin said.

Researchers designed the brace as two rigid pieces connected by an elastic band. The band can easily be released when a patient pushes down on the brace and curls or bends their finger to a certain point, allowing easy movement of the finger. When the patient extends their finger, pushing it up, the elastic band snaps back into place through a similar process and the finger becomes immobilized. Think of a snap bracelet — it's rigid until it's bent to a certain point, then it curls around the wrist.

Researchers worked with medical professionals and identified the tendons on the second knuckle of the hand where the brace could be useful. This area, known as the proximal interphalangeal joint, can be challenging to treat because post-injury stiffness can occur without adequate early mobilization.

Current finger orthoses are often static, leaving the digit immobile, and doctors usually ask that the patient remove the brace for rehabilitation exercises. Patients struggle to maintain the balance between immobility and movement, and researchers realized they needed a simple, pain-free solution to this problem. The answer was allowing the finger to move without removing the brace.

"We wanted to understand how we could help people, and what patients needed right now," said Alexandra Ion, an assistant professor in the HCII and director of the Interactive Structures Lab. "We wanted to add our expertise to build this new, unexpected thing."

The brace is customizable as well as flexible. In this initial work, the ISL researchers envision customization through software, allowing patients to easily generate a custom brace and either 3D print it themselves or have the completed device sent to them, ready to wear.

The patient needs to collect certain dimensions to customize their brace: their finger dimensions, which can be measured with a ruler; finger strength, which is measured with a force gauge; and their finger's extension angle, which can be measured with a protractor. Using these metrics, a computational design tool simulates a version of the brace. This step determines how much force, or torque, is required to safely switch the device from stiff to flexible. Based on the simulation, the tool generates a 3D design, allowing the patient to tweak it before printing.

Along with Ion and Lin, the CMU research team included Anoushka Naidu, a senior in the Computer Science Department; Dian Zhu, a senior majoring in mathematical sciences; Kenneth Yu, a junior in the HCII and School of Design; Deon Harper, a student at Pennsylvania State University who was part of the HCII's Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates program; Eni Halilaj, an associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department who directs CMU's Musculoskeletal Biomechanics Lab; and Douglas Weber, the Akhtar and Bhutta Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Deborah Kenney from Stanford University and Adam Popchak and Mark Baratz from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center were also part of the team.

Lin plans to continue developing braces and inventing adaptive devices that can be easily and comfortably worn for more users with limited mobility.

The National Science Foundation and CMU's Center for Machine Learning and Health funded this research, which will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology conference. You can learn more about this work at the ISL's website.

Alexandra Ion, faculty in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, and grad student Yuyu Lin assess the brace prototype they customized and 3D printed.

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Carnegie Mellon University

 

Tree canopy cover linked to lower risk of pedestrian falls, study finds

Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

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October 14, 2025-- Higher levels of tree canopy cover may help prevent injurious pedestrian falls, according to a new study led by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The research found that during summer months, locations on streets and sidewalks where pedestrians fell and suffered an injury were less likely to be shaded by trees than matched control locations.  The protective effect of tree canopy cover is potentially due to the cooling effects of shade from trees. The results are published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

While indoor falls have been well studied, outdoor pedestrian falls have received far less attention, despite accounting for about half a million injurious incidents in the U.S. each year. Walking has multiple health benefits and the findings provide new evidence that urban greenery, perhaps through cooling the local ambient environment, contributes to pedestrian safety.

“Many cities have tree planting campaigns, particularly street trees, but these campaigns are controversial because street trees can cause sidewalk damage, and building owners worry that this damage will put people at risk of falls,” said lead author Katie Burford, PhD, a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at North Carolina State University. “And in many areas home/building owners are responsible for sidewalk maintenance and are liable if someone falls on the sidewalk in front of their building.”

Researchers analyzed data on tree canopy cover at 497 locations where Emergency Medical Services attended to pedestrians injured in a fall between April and September 2019 and at 994 carefully matched control locations. Tree canopy cover at each location where an injurious fall occurred and at matched control locations was measured using the 2019 National Land Cover Database—the national gold standard for canopy assessment.

Average tree canopy cover at fall locations was 8 percent, compared with 14 percent at control sites. Higher tree canopy cover was strongly inversely associated with locations where a pedestrian fall occurred after controlling for neighborhood socioeconomic factors and proxy measures for pedestrian volume.

“Sidewalk-related injuries represent a substantial public health burden,” said Andrew Rundle, DrPH, professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and senior author. “Unlike indoor falls, which are often linked to personal health factors, outdoor falls are shaped by environmental conditions. Our findings suggest that tree cover, by lowering ambient temperatures, may help reduce fall risk.”

The researchers note that while outdoor fall risk is well known to be associated with snow and ice, emerging data suggest that high temperatures can increase fall risk.  High temperatures can increase fall risk by adversely affect human physiology and by degrading road and sidewalk surfaces. High heat softens asphalt and causes sidewalk pavers to pop out of alignment creating trip and fall hazards.

 “Our work demonstrates how emergency medical services data can be leveraged to study pedestrian falls on a large scale,” said Rundle. “Future studies should examine how the cooling effects of tree canopy directly influence fall risk.”

Co-authors are Alexander X. Lo, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; James W. Quinn, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health; Remle P. Crowe, ESO Solutions LLC, Austin; Allan C. Just, Brown University; Michelle C. Kondo, United States Department of Agriculture; and John R. Beard, Columbia Mailman School and Butler Columbia Aging Center.

The study was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (5T32ES007322-21, R01 ES031295), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (R01AA028552), the Columbia Center for Injury Science and Prevention (CDC R49CE003094), and the National Institute on Aging (P20 AG089308).

Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

Founded in 1922, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Columbia Mailman School is the third largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its nearly 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change and health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with more than 1,300 graduate students from 55 nations pursuing a variety of master’s and doctoral degree programs. The Columbia Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers, including ICAP and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit www.mailman.columbia.edu.

 

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Journal

American Journal of Epidemiology

DOI

10.1093/aje/kwaf231 

Article Title

Tree Canopy Cover and Injurious Pedestrian Falls: A Location-Based Case-Control Study

Article Publication Date

14-Oct-2025

 

This stapler knows when you need it

CMU researchers use AI to turn everyday objects into proactive assistants

Carnegie Mellon University

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Alexandra Ion, faculty in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, and Violet Han are part of a team using AI to turn everyday objects into proactive personal assistants.

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Credit: Carnegie Mellon University

A stapler slides across a desk to meet a waiting hand, or a knife edges out of the way just before someone leans against a countertop. It sounds like magic, but in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) researchers are combining AI and robotic mobility to give everyday objects this kind of foresight.

Using large language models (LLMs) and wheeled robotic platforms, HCII researchers have transformed ordinary items — like mugs, plates or utensils — into proactive assistants that can observe human behavior, predict interventions and move across horizontal surfaces to help humans at just the right time.

"Our goal is to create adaptive systems for physical interaction that are unobtrusive, meaning they blend into our lives while still dynamically adapting to our needs," said Alexandra Ion, an HCII assistant professor who leads the Interactive Structures Lab. "We classify this work as unobtrusive because the user does not ask the objects to perform any tasks. Instead, the objects sense what the user needs and perform the tasks themselves."

The Interactive Structures Lab's unobtrusive system uses computer vision and LLMs to reason about a person's goals, predicting what they may do or need next. A ceiling-mounted camera senses the environment and tracks the position of objects. The system then translates what the camera sees into a text-based description of the scene. Next, an LLM uses this translation to infer what the person's goals may be and which actions would help them most. Finally, the system transfers the predicted actions to the item. This process allows for seamless help with everyday tasks like cooking, organizing, office work and more.

"We have a lot of assistance from AI in the digital realm, but we want to focus on AI assistance in the physical domain," said Violet Han, an HCII Ph.D. student working with Ion. "We chose to enhance everyday objects because users already trust them. By advancing the objects' capabilities, we hope to increase that trust."

Ion and her team have started studying ways to expand the scope of unobtrusive physical AI to other parts of homes and offices.

"Imagine, for example, you come home with a bag of groceries. A shelf automatically folds out from the wall and you can set the bag down while you're taking off your coat," Ion said during her episode of the School of Computer Science's "Does Compute" podcast. "The idea is that we develop and study technology that seamlessly integrates into our daily lives and is so well assimilated that it becomes almost invisible, yet is consistently bringing us new functionality."

The Interactive Structures Lab aims to create intuitive physical interfaces that bring safe, reliable physical assistance into homes, hospitals, factories and other spaces. The team's work in unobtrusive physical AI was accepted to the 2025 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, held recently in Busan, Korea.

To learn more about the research, visit the project website.

A stapler on top of a moveable platform that can anticipate when a person will need to use it.

Credit

Carnegie Mellon University

SPACE/COSMOS

Could these wacky warm Jupiters help astronomers solve the planet formation puzzle?

Northern Arizona University

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What do you do when you have an unanticipated astronomical phenomenon, a dataset made of planets thousands of light-years away and theoretical models that fail to explain what exactly you’re looking at? 

If you’re Diego Muñoz, an assistant professor in Northern Arizona University's Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, the answer is simple: You get to work on new models.

With support from the National Science Foundation and his co-primary investigators at Indiana University Bloomington, Muñoz will head a three-year investigation into the formation of eccentric warm Jupiters—gas giant planets that exist outside our solar system and have peculiar and sometimes unprecedented oval-shaped orbits.

By the end of the study in 2028, Muñoz hopes to theoretically understand not only how these planetary outliers formed, but also if and how these astrophysical processes could have influenced the creation of our solar system.

“The variability of extrasolar planets is just enormous,” Muñoz said. “Extrasolar systems can look like our solar system, but in some cases, they look entirely different and exotic. We’re very interested in seeing how the solar system forms in context by understanding systems that look like ours and ones that look completely different. We can get a sense of what the extremes are, how average our planet formation history is and how average our solar system is.”

Some of the most interesting extreme systems, Muñoz said, are those that house eccentric warm Jupiters.

Scientists previously believed warm Jupiters could form like their well-studied hot Jupiter cousins, which have similar masses and sizes but are closer to their host stars. However, as telescopes became more advanced and data grew more precise, astronomers discovered warm Jupiters may have complex origins of their own.

While hot Jupiters can orbit their stars in almost any orientation, warm Jupiters are almost universally aligned with their hosts’ equators. Data also suggest that the more eccentric, or oval-shaped, a warm Jupiter’s orbit, the more aligned it is with its star, a phenomenon no existing model of planet formation could have predicted.

Muñoz hopes to change that by building a small but growing sample of eccentric warm Jupiters using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and basing new models and existing model updates on what he finds.

“The data tells us that warm Jupiters are not just the tail end of hot Jupiters,” Muñoz said. “It tells us they may have a different history. We need to understand if this is just a quirk—if these are pathological cases that happen maybe once every million cases—or if there is an additional physical process that we have ignored in the past that we might be able to unveil.”

Knowing what processes are at work during an eccentric warm Jupiter’s formation could help astronomers uncover hidden truths about our solar system’s evolution and the creation of countless others just like it. But before diving into the implications, Muñoz has to interrogate multiple hypotheses until he can find one that is practical and plausible.

One possibility is that these eccentric warm Jupiters have companion planets that somehow alter their orbits without misaligning them relative to their stars’ equator. Having varying eccentricities and varying inclinations simultaneously is well understood from a modeling perspective, but having one and not the other is not as easily explained.

Another concerns the gaseous nebulas in which the planets and their stars formed. Muñoz reasons that these planets could have interacted with their surroundings in ways astronomers could never have anticipated as they were developing. Discoveries of this nature could permanently change the way astronomers map planet formation.

Last, and Muñoz’s favorite, is the idea that the stars in these systems are responsible. Because stars are fluid bodies, they can develop internal waves that can sometimes crash and extract energy from a planet’s orbit in peculiar ways. He said it’s mathematically feasible that these waves could also be the reason warm Jupiters align so closely with their host stars’ equators.

The answer to which theory is correct, as of now, is a mystery, but it’s one Muñoz will be hard at work solving with myriad modeling techniques.

“I’m a theorist, so I work on models using heavy-duty computers, pencil-and-paper calculations and anything in between,” Muñoz said. “We don’t have a model that predicted this to begin with, so we’re going to go crazy and dive into the most creative ways we can think about this problem. But once you have a mathematical model, that is just the beginning.”

Next year, Muñoz will hire a graduate student who excels in creative puzzle solving to assist him throughout his modeling study. In the meantime, he said his research into his host star hypothesis has been promising, and he hopes to publish his findings in the near future.