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Research Assistant Professor & Assistant Director of Research McKechnie Family LIFE Home
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Harshal P. Mahajan is a Research Assistant Professor at the College of Applied Health Sciences. He also serves as the Assistant Director of Research of the McKechnie Family LIFE Home (Living in Interactive Future Environments) and manages research and development of smart technologies designed for enhancing the quality of life of individuals on age and disability spectrums. His educational background is in biomedical and rehabilitation engineering. His research interests span understanding barriers and facilitators that influence health and function in individuals with disabilities and developing smart rehabilitation intervention strategies involving exercise, assistive technologies, and robots to encourage functional mobility. He is a principal investigator on a federally funded research grant to evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of a multifactorial rehabilitation intervention to address falls and fear of falling related issues in wheelchair users with Multiple Sclerosis. He also supports research activities of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Technologies to Support Aging-in-Place for People with Long-term Disabilities (TechSAge) and RERC on Enhancing Neurocognitive Health, Abilities, Networks, and Community Engagement (ENHANCE). His previous research involved exploring the perceptions of trust and safety towards pediatric robotic exoskeletons as a step towards generating training recommendations for parents and clinicians and iterative development of two assistive technology systems and their clinical usability assessments with older adults, individuals with spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and those with cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis.