Serwis Infona wykorzystuje pliki cookies (ciasteczka). Są to wartości tekstowe, zapamiętywane przez przeglądarkę na urządzeniu użytkownika. Nasz serwis ma dostęp do tych wartości oraz wykorzystuje je do zapamiętania danych dotyczących użytkownika, takich jak np. ustawienia (typu widok ekranu, wybór języka interfejsu), zapamiętanie zalogowania. Korzystanie z serwisu Infona oznacza zgodę na zapis informacji i ich wykorzystanie dla celów korzytania z serwisu. Więcej informacji można znaleźć w Polityce prywatności oraz Regulaminie serwisu. Zamknięcie tego okienka potwierdza zapoznanie się z informacją o plikach cookies, akceptację polityki prywatności i regulaminu oraz sposobu wykorzystywania plików cookies w serwisie. Możesz zmienić ustawienia obsługi cookies w swojej przeglądarce.
Wearable devices to assist abnormal gaits require controllers that interact with the user in an intuitive and unobtrusive manner. To design such a controller, we investigated a bio-inspired walking controller for orthoses and prostheses. We present (i) a Simulink neuromuscular control library derived from a computational model of reflexive neuromuscular control of human gait with a central pattern...
Rehabilitation of arm and hand function is crucial to increase functional independence of stroke subjects. Here, we investigate the technical feasibility of an integrated training system combining robotics and functional electrical stimulation (FES) to support reach and grasp during functional manipulation of objects. To support grasp and release, FES controlled the thumb and fingers using Model Predictive...
This paper presents the Achilles exoskeleton, an autonomous ankle exoskeleton that can generate 52% of the positive plantarflexion power around the ankle of a 80 kg individual with only 1.5 kg of mass added around the ankle joint. The mass of the exoskeleton is lower and the power density is higher than that of existing autonomous exoskeletons. This high power density was achieved by designing a series...
Various powered wearable lower limb exoskeletons are designed for paraplegics to make them walk again. Control methods are developed and implemented in these exoskeletons to provide active gait assistance in the sagittal plane while active control in the frontal plane is still missing. This paper proposed a control method that provided gait assistance in both lateral and sagittal plane. First, in...
In this paper, a new hand and wrist exoskeleton design, the SCRIPT Passive Orthosis (SPO), for the rehabilitation after stroke is presented. The SPO is a wrist, hand, and finger orthosis that assists individuals after stroke that suffer from impairments caused by spasticity and abnormal synergies. These impairments are characterized in the wrist and hand by excessive involuntary flexion torques that...
Passive gravity compensation in exoskeletons significantly reduces the amount of torque and energy needed from the actuators. So far, no design has been able to achieve perfect balance without compromising the exoskeleton characteristics. Here we propose a novel design that integrates an existing statically-balanced mechanism with two springs and four degrees of freedom into a general-purpose exoskeleton...
Robotic gait training has developed since the end of the 20th century, yet there is much room for improvement in the design of the robots. With the conventional exoskeleton structures, donning of patients in a gait trainer usually is a cumbersome process due to the need of joint alignments and normal walking is often hindered due to obstructed arm swing. Our goal was to design a gait training robots...
Rehabilitation robotics provides a means of objectively quantifying patient condition before, during and after treatment. This paper describes the design and preliminary validation results of a novel rehabilitation device for the human wrist and forearm. The design features two key aspects: 1) it performs dynamical self-alignment to compensate for misalignment of the human limb and 2) it assists movements...
Weight and power autonomy are limiting the daily use of wearable exoskeleton. Lightweight, efficient and powerful actuation system are not easy to achieve. Choosing the right combinations of existing technologies, such as battery, gear and motor is not a trivial task. In this paper, we propose an optimization framework by setting up a power-based quasi-static model of the exoskeleton joint drivetrain...
It is hypothesized that healthy humans can reduce their energy expenditure during walking by wearing an exoskeleton. Exoskeletons are often designed for mechanical efficiency at joint level. This approach disregards the energy savings mechanisms in the human leg like bi-articular muscles and tendons. We use the muscle-reflex model to simulate the experiments by Cain et al. with an ankle exoskeleton...
Inferring temporal derivatives (like velocity and acceleration) from a noisy position signal is a well-known challenge in control engineering, due to the intrinsic trade-off between noise filtering and estimation bandwidth. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose a new approach specifically designed for periodic movements. This approach uses an adaptive oscillator as fundamental building...
Stroke often has a disabling effect on the ability to use the hand in a functional manner. Accurate finger and thumb positioning is necessary for many activities of daily living. In the current study, the feasibility of novel FES based approaches for positioning the thumb and fingers for grasp and release of differently sized objects is evaluated. Assistance based on these approaches may be used in...
This paper presents MINDWALKER, which is an ambitious EC funded research project coordinated by Space Applications Services aiming at the development of novel Brain Neural Computer Interfaces (BNCI) and robotics technologies, with the goal of obtaining a crutch-less assistive lower limbs exoskeleton, with non-invasive brain control approach as main strategy. Complementary BNCI control approaches such...
In this paper we present a method to estimate a feed-forward torque to support human walking. Our method does not require a model of human walking or pre-recorded gait data. Instead we use muscle EMG as a learning signal to construct a feed-forward torque with an adaptive algorithm. As a proof of principle a pilot study on a single muscle was performed to test the method. The pilot showed that for...
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a noninvasive method to modify behaviour of neurons in the brain. TMS is applied by running large currents through a coil close to the scalp. For consistent results it is required to maintain the coil position within millimetres of the targeted location, but natural head sway and practitioner fatigue may hinder this. Serial robots are currently used to assist...
An exoskeleton has to be lightweight, compliant, yet powerful to fulfill the demanding task of walking. This imposes a great challenge for the actuator design. Electric motors, by far the most common actuator in robotic, orthotic, and prosthetic devices, cannot provide sufficiently high peak and average power and force/torque output, and they normally require high-ratio, heavy reducer to produce the...
We developed a passive exoskeleton that was designed to minimize joint work during walking. The exoskeleton makes use of passive structures, called artificial tendons, acting in parallel with the leg. Artificial tendons are elastic elements that are able to store and redistribute energy over the human leg joints. The elastic characteristics of the tendons have been optimized to minimize the mechanical...
Robotics used for diagnostic measurements on, e.g. stroke survivors, require actuators that are both stiff and compliant. Stiffness is required for identification purposes, and compliance to compensate for the robots dynamics, so that the subject can move freely while using the robot. A hydraulic actuator can act as a position (stiff) or a torque (compliant) actuator. The drawback of a hydraulic actuator...
In this paper, we further develop our framework to design new assistance and rehabilitation protocols based on motor primitives. In particular, we extend our recent results of oscillator-based assistance to the case of walking. The adaptive oscillator used in this paper is capable of predicting the angular position of the user's joints in the future, based on the pattern learned during preceding cycles...
Gait-training robots must display a low inertia in order to allow normal-looking walking. We studied the effect of inertia added to the pelvis during walking. We attached subjects to a mechanism that displays inertia to the pelvis in the anterior/posterior (AP) direction and the lateral direction independently. During walking we measured EMG, metabolic rate and kinematics of nine subjects. We found...
Podaj zakres dat dla filtrowania wyświetlonych wyników. Możesz podać datę początkową, końcową lub obie daty. Daty możesz wpisać ręcznie lub wybrać za pomocą kalendarza.