Stephan Stansfield

Stephan Stansfield is a graduate student in mechanical engineering designing a lightweight, passive sit-to-stand device that helps older adults maintain strength and prevent falls. While falls are the leading cause of injury among older adults, assistive devices are frequently rejected due to concerns about comfort and stigma. Stephan invented a mechanism that stores energy as users sit and releases concentrated assistance during standing—weighing only 100 grams, 10 times lighter than active exoskeleton actuators. He used MATLAB to optimize mechanism kinematics and create robot trajectories for validation, achieving high correlation between predicted and measured force outputs across multiple trials. Stephan mentored an undergraduate developing a real-time Bayesian classifier on Arduino using Simulink support packages, testing across 28 participants aged 18–95 to identify age-dependent differences in movement patterns. As a second-year MathWorks Fellow, he will integrate motion recognition with adaptive device control and conduct human studies. Stephan’s work aims to demonstrate how human-centered, optimization-driven design can improve technology adoption among populations most in need of assistance.