Meet Adrianne, she’s a dancer who lives in Boston, Massachusetts
Her life and passion is dance and she works a ballroom dance instructor.
Unfortunately during the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 she got affected and lost one of her legs.
But she never gave up. Once she started her recovery from the marathon bombing she had one goal … “I’m going to dance again.”
After having initial rehab with a prosthetist in order to start walking again, she met Hugh Herr, a professor in HST as well as the head of the Biomechatronics lab in the Media Lab. Hugh is also a double amputee caused by a rock climbing accident on Mt. Washington when he was 16 years old.
In the process the engineers in the lab were tasked with building a controller for her prosthetic that would give her full mobility of a dancer. In order to design this controller, we used a motion capture system to record the motions of a dancer who worked with Adrianne.
( That’s me in the back working really hard :D)
After long hours of collecting the data and designing a controller for Adrianne we made a successful controller in order for her to dance like she used to.
She was awed by the success and many people were awed by her ambitious and relentless journey to pursue her dreams and return to dancing.