Cornelia Fermüller

The system Fermüller is working on is intended to offer functional independence to victims of stroke, particularly among individuals with moderate to severe functional deficits.

Stroke is a leading cause of long-term disability among American adults, with nearly 795,000 new cases each year. Of the 2.5 million survivors, impaired hand function is one of the most frequently persisting consequences.

Fermüller is responsible for developing the computer vision component of the system, which will monitor the position and pose of the hand and objects and will create the control signal for moving the mechanical components of the glove.

She is working with one of her doctoral students, Yezhou Yang, to develop software that can track and compute the position and orientation of different parts of the human hand over a period of time.

The research jumpstarted with funding from a competitive seed grant program that is part of the MPowering the State initiative, which joins researchers at the University of Maryland with physicians, clinicians and other health experts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.