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About

Taya Hamilton is a biomechanics and rehabilitation researcher whose work bridges robotics, motor control, and neurorecovery. Her primary research areas include passive joint stiffness, robotic gait rehabilitation, and quantitative assessment of motor impairment after neurological injury. Hamilton’s most impactful work, "Passive Wrist Stiffness: The Influence of Handedness" (32 citations), established foundational knowledge on how handedness and gender affect wrist biomechanics, informing rehabilitation protocols and sports medicine. She is a key contributor to the MIT-Skywalker project, a robotic gait-training device for stroke and neurological injury survivors, where she evaluated saddle-seat comfort and markerless motion control systems. Her two-part study on robotic kinematic measures in chronic stroke (2021) demonstrated that distal wrist measurements strongly correlate with clinical outcome measures, advancing objective, high-resolution assessment of motor recovery. Hamilton’s work has accumulated over 87 citations, reflecting its growing influence in rehabilitation engineering. Notably, she has explored aging and hand dominance effects on wrist stiffness in athletes, such as squash players, linking repetitive unilateral activity to long-term joint changes. Her research is instrumental in developing more personalized, data-driven rehabilitation strategies.