Design and Analysis of a Smart Rehabilitation Walker With Passive Pelvic Mechanism

BACKGROUND: Along with China entering an aging society, the percentage of people that over 60 will reach 34.9% in 2050, resulted in a significant increase in stroke patients. OBJECTIVE: This paper proposes a rehabilitation robotic walker for walking assistance during the daily life, and a control method for the motor relearning during the gait training. The walker consists of an omni-directional mobile platform (OMP) which ensures the walker can move on the ground, a body weight support system (BWS) which is capable of providing the desired unloading force, and a pelvic assist mechanism (PAM) to provide the user with four degrees of freedom and avoid the rigid impact. The study goal is to gain a better understanding of the assist-as-needed control strategy during the gait training. METHODS: For the man-machine interaction control, the assist-as-needed control strategy is adopted to guide the users’ motions and improve the interaction experience. To build the force field in the three-dimensional space, the dynamics of the system is derived to increase the accuracy of force control. RESULTS: The simulation results show that the force field around the motion trajectory was generated in the three-dimensional space. In order to understand the force field, we designed the simulation on sagittal plane and the controller can generate the appropriate force field. The preliminary experiment results were consistent with the simulation results. CONCLUSION: Based on the mathematical simulation and the preliminary test, the results demonstrate that the proposed system can provide the guide force around the target trajectory, the accuracy of force control still remains to be improved.

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“…For the active part of the walker, the backward recursive method is adopted to calculate the joint wrench [ 21 ], the wrench acting on the

th joint can be expressed as:…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulation study on assist-as-needed control of a rehabilitation robotic walker

Wang

Gong

Song

et al. 2023

THC

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“…The decision rule by the interaction forces has been discussed in the previous paper ( Ji et al, 2020 ). For facial recognition, we use a real sense camera to detect the Yaw, Roll, and Pitch angle of the head, the angle feature

is used to assist the prediction.…”

Section: Modeling and Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal fusion and human-robot interaction control of an intelligent robot

Gong,

Chen,

Wang

et al. 2024

Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.

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Introduction: Small-scaled robotic walkers play an increasingly important role in Activity of Daily Living (ADL) assistance in the face of ever-increasing rehab requirements and existing equipment drawbacks. This paper proposes a Rehabilitation Robotic Walker (RRW) for walking assistance and body weight support (BWS) during gait rehabilitation.Methods: The walker provides the patients with weight offloading and guiding force to mimic a series of the physiotherapist’s (PT’s) movements, and creates a natural, comfortable, and safe environment. This system consists of an omnidirectional mobile platform, a BWS mechanism, and a pelvic brace to smooth the motions of the pelvis. To recognize the human intentions, four force sensors, two joysticks, and one depth-sensing camera were used to monitor the human-machine information, and a multimodal fusion algorithm for intention recognition was proposed to improve the accuracy. Then the system obtained the heading angle E, the pelvic pose F, and the motion vector H via the camera, the force sensors, and the joysticks respectively, classified the intentions with feature extraction and information fusion, and finally outputted the motor speed control through the robot’s kinematics.Results: To validate the validity of the algorithm above, a preliminary test with three volunteers was conducted to study the motion control. The results showed that the average error of the integral square error (ISE) was 2.90 and the minimum error was 1.96.Discussion: The results demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed method, and that the system is capable of providing walking assistance.

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“…From the pelvic motion analysis and previous experience [31], it is difficult to achieve all pelvic motions and limit the RoM at the same time with serial mechanism. Having previously designed a walker with a serial pelvic mechanism, a major limitation was irregular signal inputs.…”

Section: A System Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Control of an Omni-Directional Robotic Walker Based on Human–Machine Interaction

Chen

Wang

et al. 2021

IEEE Access

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A cornerstone of the rehabilitative regime for people diagnosed with dyskinesia is walking assist and gait training, however, prolonged care, provided by relatives or professionals, serves as a massive financial burden to patients. The proposed novel robotic walker seeks to address this concern. The walker incorporates human motion intention recognition to facilitate lower limb rehabilitation training and daily walking. The walker design places strong emphasis on patient safety and quality of life by providing omnidirectional walking assist, four key pelvic motions that support hip rotations and comfortable body weight support (BWS). Additionally, five sensors were installed to identify the user's motion intention from the interaction forces surrounding the pelvis and dead zone. Furthermore, Kalman filtering was used to guarantee the quality of the interactive signal while kinematic and dynamic models were derived to generate appropriate driving velocities to support patient's body weight and improve mobility. To validate our design, MATLAB simulations and exploratory clinical trials using healthy subjects were performed. Preliminary results demonstrate satisfactory kinematic performance and suggest the walker as a promising therapeutic avenue for individuals suffering from dyskinesia and other associated movement disorders.

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Design and Analysis of a Smart Rehabilitation Walker With Passive Pelvic Mechanism

Cited by 12 publications

References 31 publications

Simulation study on assist-as-needed control of a rehabilitation robotic walker

Simulation study on assist-as-needed control of a rehabilitation robotic walker

Multimodal fusion and human-robot interaction control of an intelligent robot

Design and Control of an Omni-Directional Robotic Walker Based on Human–Machine Interaction

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