Jamie Greenfield

Jamie completed his Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) specialising in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Auckland in 2015 where he spent his final year undertaking an Honours research project in the development of a novel knee brace for rehabilitation of knee ligament injuries under the supervision of Dr Claire Davies and Dr Andrew McDaid. This project involved the design of a soft-stop mechanism through an iterative development process that included human pilot trials with motion capture to validate the design. In undertaking this project, Jamie became particularly interested in the relationship between between engineering with the human body. This interest saw Jamie return to the University of Auckland to complete a research-based Master in Mechanical Engineering which he completed in early 2017 again under the supervision of Dr. Andrew McDaid.

Jamie’s Master’s research investigated the use of rehabilitation robotics to assess human motor-function. A prototype of a five-bar linkage gait trainer, named the Paediatric Overground Gait Trainer (PRO-GaiT), was developed in conjunction with an assessment algorithm. This algorithm was comprised of; a kinematic model that could derive end-effector position and joint kinematics, a set of quantitative metrics that characterised human movement biases, and, a musculoskeletal model that used the derived kinematics of the PRO-GaiT’s user to approximate muscle fibre lengths, fibre velocities, muscle forces and muscle activations. The accuracy of the system was successfully validated against an optical motion capture system with EMG recordings in a pilot study that involved five participants.

After successfully completing his Masters, Jamie took up a role as a product development engineer for Fisher & Paykel Healthcare’s Surgical Humidification product group. Here, Jamie works on the HumiGard system which delivers heated and humidified gas for laparoscopic and open surgery.

Selected Publications

J. R. J. Greenfield. H. F. Hwang, C. Davies, A. J. McDaid. “The influence of the Re-Link Trainer on gait symmetry in healthy adults.” 2017 International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR) (2017). 17th-20th July 2017.