In the summer of 2025, UNCA Computer Science major Daniel Delong participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the University of Central Florida’s pediatric prosthetics research lab, Limbitless Solutions. His primary research focused on developing a prosthetic arm control system that was both intuitive and more useful for kids. Simultaneously, Daniel contributed to two haptics projects that used tactile buzzing to convey alerts and confirm successful actions to the user. The main goal with these projects was to restore a sense of the naturally occurring sensory feedback in the human arm.
His primary project went on to receive first place in an internal UCF research symposium. More impressively, in October, he was able to present his work at the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Annual Meeting in San Diego, California. Daniel and his REU collaborators presented their research titled “Developing a Multi-Site Haptic System for Upper Limb Prostheses to Provide Real-time Vibrotactile Feedback.”
Prosthetics research is personal for Daniel. In 2024, Daniel lost his leg when an automobile struck him and several others while he was a student at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Kelowna, Canada. Shortly after his amputation, he began experimenting with designs and creating his own legs. It was this personal experience, along with the technical skills he gained in the UNCA CS program, that helped him get into this competitive REU program that admitted just 2% of applicants. At the end of his research program, one of the research staff members commented on how valuable Daniel’s Computer Science experience was to his projects, saying to him, “in just 9 weeks’ time, you proposed a system so intuitive I couldn’t believe we’d never even considered it before.”
Daniel’s contributions to these projects epitomize the value of a UNCA CS education: computer science is applicable to nearly every field, where a student’s training and creativity can be applied to solve complex problems. In Daniel’s case, close student-faculty interactions were the catalyst that led to this opportunity. The experience began when Daniel visited Prof. Kevin Sanft’s office hours in the spring. As they chatted, Prof. Sanft asked what his plans were for the summer. “Have you ever considered an REU?” “What’s that?” was Daniel’s reply. That conversation got the process started for Daniel. In reflecting on the experience, Daniel said, “I was at UBC, the 2nd highest ranked research university [in Canada], but every time I tried to get involved in research, I was turned down. At UNCA it took one 30-minute conversation.”
