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This research compares walking over ground, on a split-belt treadmill, on a tied-belt treadmill, and on the Gait Enhancing Mobile Shoe (GEMS) in both humans and simulated on a passive dynamic model. Passive Dynamic Walkers (PDW) have been researched for decades, yet only recently has the model been used significantly in gait rehabilitation. We aim to identify how well the two-dimensional PDW can be...
This paper develops a body-machine interface for the control of a powered wheelchair using upper-body motion. Our goal was to infer a cursor's kinematics from the signals recorded from 4 Inertial Measurement Units placed on a subject's shoulders. We specified a Kalman filter measurement model that assumes the Euler angles, angular velocities, and linear accelerations of the shoulders are a stochastic...
Gait and balance training is an essential ingredient for locomotor rehabilitation of patients with neurological impairments. Robotic overhead support systems may help these patients train, for example by relieving them of part of their body weight. However, there are only very few systems that provide support during overground gait, and these suffer from limited degrees of freedom and/or undesired...
Due to neuromuscular disorders (e.g., Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy) people often loose muscle strength and become wheelchair bound. It is important to use muscles as much as possible. To allow this, and to increase independency of patients, an arm orthosis can be used to perform activities of daily life. The orthosis compensates for the gravity force of the arm, allowing people to perform movements...
Recent studies have explored the integration of additional input modalities to improve myoelectric control of prostheses. Arm dynamics in particular are an interesting option, as these can be measured easily by means of accelerometers. In this work, the benefit of accelerometer signals is demonstrated on a large scale movement classification task, consisting of 40 hand and wrist movements obtained...
This paper proposes a robotic hand rehabilitation device for grasp training. The device is designed for stroke patients to train and recover their hand grasp function in order to undertake activities of daily living (ADL). The device consists of a control unit, two small actuators, an infrared (IR) sensor, and pressure sensors in the grasp handle. The advantages of this device are that it is small...
This paper presents the design of a novel linear series elastic actuator purposely designed to match the requirements of robots for wrist rehabilitation: backdriveabil-ity, intrinsic compliance, and capability to be controlled as ideal force/torque sources. An existing rehabilitation robot is adapted to include intrinsic compliance in the design. A novel linear compliant element is designed to meet...
This paper describes the design and pilot testing of a novel device for unobtrusive monitoring of wrist and hand movement through a sensorized watch and a magnetic ring system called the manumeter. The device senses the magnetic field of the ring through two triaxial magnetometers and records the data to onboard memory which can be analyzed later by connecting the watch unit to a computer. Wrist and...
People with severe arm impairment have limited technologies available for retraining their arms, and, if they also have difficulty walking, they often cannot effectively use a manual wheelchair because they cannot grasp and push the pushrim. We are using Lever-Actuated Resonance Assistance (LARA) to solve these problems. A LARA-based device can attach to a manual wheelchair and allow it to be used...
People with cognitive and/or motor impairments may benefit from using telepresence robots to engage in social activities. To date, these robots, their user interfaces, and their navigation behaviors have not been designed for operation by people with disabilities. We conducted an experiment in which participants (n=12) used a telepresence robot in a scavenger hunt task to determine how they would...
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...
Recent technological advances have allowed the development of force-dependent, intelligently controlled smart walkers that are able to provide users with enhanced mobility, support and gait assistance. The purpose of this study was to develop an intelligent rule-based controller for a smart walker to achieve a smooth interaction between the user and the walker. This study developed a rule-based mapping...
The people with spinal cord injuries (SCI) or post stroke hemiplegia are easily exposed to secondary problems due to limited mobility. A new wheelchair integrated lower limb exercise/rehabilitation system is proposed to help their daily living and rehabilitation. The system consists of three main modules: 1) an electric wheelchair, 2) a lifter which raises and supports the subject's body weight, and...
The purpose of this paper is to present a concept of human-robot-interaction control for robots with compliant pneumatic soft-actuators which are directly attached to the human body. Backdrivability of this type of actuators is beneficial for comfort and safety and they are well suitable to design rehabilitation robots for training of activities of daily living (ADL). The concept is verified with...
In previous work we showed that some human Voluntary Muscle Contractions (VMCs) of high interest to the prosthetics community, namely finger flexions/extensions and thumb rotation, can be effectively predicted using muscle activation signals coming from surface electromyography (sEMG). In this paper we study the effectiveness of various subsampling strategies to limit the size of the training data...
In recent years, robot-assisted rehabilitation has gained momentum as a viable means for improving outcomes for therapeutic interventions. Such therapy experiences allow controlled and repeatable trials and quantitative evaluation of mobility metrics. Typically though these robotic devices have been focused on rehabilitation within a clinical setting. In these traditional robot-assisted rehabilitation...
Bimanual rehabilitation allows an individual with hemiparesis to use their sound arm to help rehabilitate their impaired arm and shows promise as a means of low cost home use rehabilitation. However, few studies have attempted to determine the best combination of bimanual symmetry modes and coupling stiffnesses. To examine the effects of stiffness and symmetry type, we have developed a compliant bimanual...
This paper presents an adaptive control approach for robotic movement therapy that learns a state-dependent model of patient impairment. Unlike previous work, this approach uses an unstructured inertial model that depends on both the position and direction of the desired motion in the robot's workspace. This method learns a patient impairment model that accounts for movement specific disability in...
It is believed that the quality of arm mobility in planar reach movements can be adequately characterized by measures of planar position and vertical force. For the purpose of impairment assessment, it is further proposed that a complete picture of mobility performance can be represented through the assessment of metrics representative of each of four capacities: 1) Range of motion, 2) Range of force,...
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