Levi J Hargrove

The clinical focus of Dr. Hargrove's work is to apply promising control approaches to improve the control of prosthetic limbs and exoskeletons.

Levi J. Hargrove, PhD, P.Eng, received his MScE and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Brunswick (2005, 2008). He is currently the Director of Center for Bionic Medicine at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and an Associate Professor in the Departments of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. A major goal of his research is to develop clinically realizable myoelectric control systems that can be made available to persons with limb loss in the near future. His research addresses all levels of amputation and has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine and multiple patents. Key projects include the development of advanced and adaptive control systems for prosthetic legs, improving control of robotic hand prostheses, and intramuscular EMG signal processing. In 2012, Dr. Hargrove co-founded Coapt LLC, a company which provides the first and only intuitive pattern recognition control systems for bionic arms.

The academic focus of Dr. Hargrove's work is to apply machine learning and pattern recognition techniques to improve control of robotic assistive devices for individuals with physical disabilities. Promising approaches are implemented on embedded systems and tested on physical hardwre with users in-the-loop providing feedback.