MARIN ACADEMY RESEARCH COLLABORATIVE​

January 14, 2019

My name is Jacob and I’m a Junior at Marin Academy and in my first year of the MARC (Marin Academy Research Collaborative) program. It’s a two year program where students can research and study their own topic of interest with help from a mentor. I’m specifically interested in prosthetic and robotic hands, and the brain to machine interfacing. I’m especially interested in hand prosthetics because I play the violin and I saw something about a robotic hand that you could control with your mind, and I got really interested. I noticed that a lot of the hands were slow and not very accurate, and having a background in violin, I wanted to see if I could possibly make it more responsive and accurate to how organic fingers work. My first idea for a project was to make my own prosthetic hand, but that was too big of a feat for a high schooler to do, so I decided to change to just a finger. I figured that I could get the finger responding quickly and I wouldn’t have to deal with a big task like the whole hand. I stayed with this idea for a while, but in my research, I found that making the prosthetics faster/more responsive isn’t really a problem with the interfacing, which I was most interested in, but the actual mechanics of the prosthetic. Creating a faster hand mainly involved researching better motors and more sensitive servos-not really something you can experiment on. I finally landed on researching input that goes back to the user of the prosthetic. Mainly tactile sensing. A lot of people are developing more accurate hands because they have a whole lab and are on the front edge of development in that area, but tactile input is a relatively unresearched field. I still want to stick with only using maybe a finger, as it simplifies the mechanical side of the project that I’m not really focusing on. I’m planning on first trying to get readings of what ligaments and muscles are activated for certain movements using electrode sensing. Then, I’m going to try and stimulate the feel of touching something with electrodes again. It might sound out of reach for someone in high school, but according to a recent study by Johns Hopkins, it is possible to do using non-invasive skin level electrodes.

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January 21, 2019

I’m still drafting my resume for an internship that all MARC students are required to apply for. I’m going to email Dr. Vendrell-Lopiz, who works at UC Berkeley as a neuroscientist. I’m also working on my cover letter and finishing up my edits to my research proposal. Not that much is happening though.

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January 28, 2019

Nothing really happened this week. I'm working on finishing my resume, that we are going to use to apply to internships.

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February 4, 2019

Nothing is really happening still.

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February 11, 2019

I'm not really working on my project yet, because we are working on lesson plans. Basically, everyone in the class is going to make a short lesson that involves explaining what they're project is about. We also have to create homework, and an activity that we conduct during  the class. We each have to present for 25 minutes. I'm going to do some kind of PowerPoint presentation, and use the human to machine or human to human interface as my activity. Basically, the human to human/machine interface is a device that uses an arduino and takes the electrical impulses from one person's arm and replicates them in either another person, or a machine.

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February 18, 2019

People are presenting their lessons. Mine is on Thursday (the 21st). 

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February 25, 2019

Right now, we have Minicourse. Instead of having a normal ski week, we instead of specialized one week courses. I'm in the film course, where we watch old and new movies and then go over the themes and things like that.

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March 4, 2019

Not much happened this week.

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March 11, 2019

I've had a fever over the weekend, and a really sore throat. I didn't make it to school today, and I think that this week is going to be out. I tested for strep, and it came back negative, but I think that it might be the flu.

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Lights are fading... My vision is getting blurry. I definitely have the flu. No doubt about it. This is the end of the road for my MARC research. Aight bruh Imma boutta head out.