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Rehabilitation robots (RR) are expected to play an important role toward the independent life of older persons and persons with disabilities. Such intelligent devices, embedded into the home environment, can provide the resident with 24-hour movement assistance. Modern home-installed robots tend to be not only physically versatile in functionality but also emotionally human-friendly, i.e. they may...
Popular culture presents the image of a robot as a mechanical, humanoid device, often evil in intent. Those with a slightly more informed technical knowledge would point to the industrial robot arm of the automotive factory, Even professional engineers, are affected to some extent or other by these popular images. In attempting to survey four decades of the development of rehabilitation robotics...
The design of robot dedicated to person with disabilities necessitates users implication in all steps of product development: design solution, prototyping the system, choice of users interfaces, and testing it with users in real conditions. However, before any design of any system, it is necessary to understand and meet the needs of the disabled users. In this chapter, we describe our research activity...
Utopia – it would be a society where the welfare of the people is properly guaranteed. In the society, each constituent would live his/her life with the blessed feeling of equality. In particular, it would be a society where the elderly and even the handicapped would live well, independently, and comfortably along with people without disabilities. It is instructive to note that the number of the...
The research and development in the field of rehabilitation robots produced a multiplicity of rehabilitation robots available as off-the- shelf products or laboratory prototypes (e.g. [1]). The application scope of these systems is large and covers ranges such as support for everyday tasks, assistance in the vocational surroundings or support in health care. An in-depth analysis unveils that rehabilitation...
The rapidly changing demographics in industrialized nations create a pressing need for effective personal assistive aids that appeal to elderly and disabled users. Our goal is to design robotic aids that are not only affordable and commercially viable but also have universal appeal and benefit. To do so, we explore the creation of the robot appliance, a personal robotic aid with the ability to function...
This paper explains the cooperative work system between manipulators and humans using hand gesture instructions. The goal of our system is that the manipulator can work with humans in the same working space according to the instructions of hand gestures. Our cooperative welfare robot system is composed of the manipulator, a PC and a trinocular stereovision hardware. Since the system has to...
Eating is a basic need for humans. In fact, it is so basic that most people are not aware of the motions that they use while eating. For some physically disabled people, eating can be laborious or a bit embarrassing since they must rely on a caretaker to feed them. “My Spoon” is a meal-assistance device designed to assist these people during meals. Its basic concept is to allow a user to “eat a meal...
Controlling MANUS, a wheelchair-mounted manipulator, can put a high cognitive load on the end user. Visual servoing techniques can help to reduce this load. This paper describes a visual servoing system that can assist the end-user in carrying out all day living tasks. No a-priori information about the object to manipulate is used (allowing operation in unstructured environments). The system is to...
It was reported previously that many MANUS users thought that the MANUS was useful, but not useful enough to gain totally independent lifestyles for several reasons; it moves too slowly, it cannot handle heavy goods, and its manipulative arm is not long enough. It would technically be easy to develop a faster, more powerful and bigger robot than the MANUS to meet these requests, however, such a high...
An aged society comes soon. Human-care robots must be realized to nurse aged and disabled persons. Human-care robot will need to work around elderly people and give them touches; therefore conventional safety strategies for industrial robots can not be applied to human-care robots. It is now necessary to make a new study of safety in the space where a human and a machine will exist together.
Safety is one of the most important features of rehabilitation robots. However, strategies for safe rehabilitation robots are not yet clarified. A basic strategy for safe industrial robots is isolation, which cannot be applied to rehabilitation robots because they must work near or in contact with humans. This problem has been discussed in a special committee of the Japan Robot Association...
This chapter describes our research activity on the integration of a robotic arm in the environment of persons with disabilities. People who have lost the abilities to use their proper arms to perform daily living task could use an adapted robot to compensate, even partly, the problems of objects manipulation generated by their handicap. Many robotized systems have been developed, however the manipulation...
This chapter describes both the current (Anno Domini 2003) and future processes of prescribing the Assistive Robotic Manipulator (ARM, also known as “Manus”) to potential client/users within the Dutch public health insurance system. In addition, the results of two studies conducted in the Netherlands relevant to the costeffectiveness of the ARM, the indication criteria, and targeted user groups,...
The development of a prosthetic hand able to replicate as much as possible the grasping and sensory features of the natural hand represents an ambitious project for scientists. State of the art technology is still far to provide engineers with components with similar performance of their natural models, and active prosthetic hands can be only a pale replication of the missing natural limb. This chapter...
A passive gravity-balanced, 4 DoF arm orthosis was built for children with arm weakness such as in muscular dystrophy. The orthosis is identically gravity balanced in 3D with linear elastic elements. The orthosis has an exoskeletal configuration and is attached to the back of a wheelchair. Algorithms that yield an improved gravity-balancing scheme are derived and a new mechanical structure of the...
The present chapter introduces a navigation algorithm for a wheelchair in semistructured home environment. The user sets the end position and orientation of the wheelchair and the controller autonomously steers the wheelchair from the current position to the goal. The algorithm includes a procedure for automatic creation of an initial map of the wheelchair surroundings that is used afterwards for...
As rehabilitation technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and computer science have been rapidly developed, the dream of overcoming handicap comes true. This article presents a design of intelligent wheelchair system to be able to provide mobility aid to the disabled who has difficulties in driving a conventional powered wheelchair. First we conducted a survey for identifying the...
An electrically assisted walking aid with a force-sensing device embedded in its supporting arm has been developed. The force sensor consists of a pair of Ushaped members joined by four rubber springs and four gap sensors that detect the relative displacements between the members. It calculates forward and vertical forces from the displacements, and thus determines the torque about the vertical axis...
In this paper, “Do-u-mi”, a robotic care system is introduced (Do-u-mi means “helper” in Korean) (see Fig. 20.1). It is particularly aimed at the elderly who cannot walk without assistance. The main function of the Do-u-mi robot is to provide walking support. The robot also has many entertainment functions. The robot is developed with a human-friendly design and has an intelligent human-robot interface...
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