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Carlos Cifuentes is an associate professor of human-robot interaction at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), University of the West of England (UWE Bristol), UK. Previously, he was an assistant professor at Universidad del Rosario and the Colombian School of Engineering Julio Garavito from 2016 to May 2022 (Colombia), where he also led the Centre for Biomechatronics. Carlos completed his postdoctoral research and PhD at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (Brazil) in 2015.

With over 12 years of experience, Carlos has led numerous projects on designing, developing, testing, and deploying robots for rehabilitation, assistance, and empowerment. His collaborative research with healthcare professionals has extensively examined the short- and long-term impacts of robotic tools on various health conditions, including cardiac diseases, post-stroke recovery, spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy, Parkinson's disease, ageing-related issues, musculoskeletal disorders, and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) treatment.

Upon joining BRL at UWE Bristol two years ago, Carlos has secured approximately £1.5 million in UK funding directly, serving as principal investigator and partner lead, and indirectly around £13 million. He is actively pursuing additional funding opportunities to advance critical technologies for independent living in collaboration with industry partners. Carlos's research is globally recognized for its contributions to human-robot interaction and its potential to transform healthcare, significantly improving the quality of life for individuals with diverse health conditions.

Projects

Books

Interfacing Humans and Robots for Gait Assistance and Rehabilitation, 2021 (Co-author: Prof Dr. Marcela Múnera)

The concepts represented in this textbook are explored for the first time in assistive and rehabilitation robotics, which is the combination of physical, cognitive, and social human-robot interaction to empower gait rehabilitation and assist human mobility. The aim is to consolidate the methodologies, modules, and technologies implemented in lower-limb exoskeletons, smart walkers, and social robots when human gait assistance and rehabilitation are the primary targets. 

This book presents the combination of emergent technologies in healthcare applications and robotics science, such as soft robotics, force control, novel sensing methods, brain-computer interfaces, serious games, automatic learning, and motion planning. From the clinical perspective, case studies are presented for testing and evaluating how those robots interact with humans, analyzing acceptance, perception, biomechanics factors, and physiological mechanisms of recovery during the robotic assistance or therapy. 

Interfacing Humans and Robots for Gait Assistance and Rehabilitation will enable undergraduate and graduate students of biomedical engineering, rehabilitation engineering, robotics, and health sciences to understand the clinical needs, technology, and science of human-robot interaction behind robotic devices for rehabilitation, and the evidence and implications related to the implementation of those devices in actual therapy and daily life applications. 


Human-Robot Interaction Strategies for Walker-Assisted Locomotion, 2016 (Advisor: Prof Dr. Anselmo Frizera)

Different types of pathologies may affect human mobility. It is also known that human capacities in mobility decrease gradually with age. In this scenario, walkers present important benefits for human mobility, improving balance and reducing the load on their lower limbs. Most importantly, walkers induce the use of residual mobility capacities of the user in generic environments. 

This doctoral thesis presents a multimodal human-robot interface that provides a means of testing and validating control strategies for robotic walkers for assisting the human mobility and gait rehabilitation. This interface extracts navigation intentions from a novel sensor fusion strategy that combines a LRF (Laser Range Finder) sensor to estimate the users legs' kinematics from the walker, along with wearable IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) sensors to capture the human orientation. At the same time, force sensors measure the interaction forces between the human and the walker.

(Book) An improved version of this thesis was published in Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics 

This book presents the development of a new multimodal human-robot interface for testing and validating control strategies applied to robotic walkers for assisting human mobility and gait rehabilitation. The aim is to achieve a closer interaction between the robotic device and the individual, empowering the rehabilitation potential of such devices in clinical applications. A new multimodal human-robot interface for testing and validating control strategies applied to robotic walkers for assisting human mobility and gait rehabilitation is presented. Trends and opportunities for future advances in the field of assistive locomotion via the development of hybrid solutions based on the combination of smart walkers and biomechatronic exoskeletons are also discussed.

OPEN SOURCE ROBOTS 

(licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License)