Wearable exoskeletons to support ambulation in people with neuromuscular diseases, design rules and control

Neuromuscular diseases are degenerative and, thus far, incurable disorders that lead to large muscle wasting. They result in constant deterioration of activities of daily living and in particular of ambulation. Some common types include Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, polymyositis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. While these diseases individually have a low rate of occurrence and are mostly unknown to most people, collectively they affect a significant part of the population. About 1 person in 2000 suffer from neuromuscular diseases, which means an approximate total of 370â000 people over the European continent. Recent technology breakthroughs have made possible the realization of advanced powered orthotics, which are commonly called exoskeletons. The most advanced devices have successfully been able to support patients in walking despite a debilitating condition such as complete spinal cord injury. Such technology could be ideal for people with mid-stage neuromuscular diseases as it provides more mobility and independence. This work investigates the definitions and requirements that would need to be fulfilled for any proposed orthotic device to assist people living with neuromuscular diseases. To define the needs of patients with neuromuscular disease, a large literature review is conducted on gait compensation patterns. The research also includes the data collection of experimental gait measurements from fourteen people with heterogeneous neuromuscular diseases. Conclusions show that orthotics for people with neuromuscular diseases require tunable assistance at each joint and a collaborative control strategy in order to let the user control motion. Eventually, most people may not be able to use crutches. A full lower limb exoskeleton, AUTONOMYO, is designed, realized and evaluated. A particular attention is put on the optimization of the actuator and transmission units. In order to reduce the effects of inertia and weight of those units, a design is explored with actuation remotely located from the joints. The transmission is realized by custom cable wire and pulley systems, combined with standard planetary gears. The dynamics of different coupling between the hip and the knee flexion/extension joints are explored, and their benefits and tradeoffs analyzed. A novel control strategy based on a finite-state active impedance model is designed and implemented on the AUTONOMYO device. The controller consists of three states of different active impedances mimicking a visco-elastic behavior. The switching condition between states is uniquely based on the hip flexion velocity to detect the user intent. The performance of the strategy regarding the detection of intention and the modulation of the assistance is evaluated on a test bench and in real conditions with healthy pilots and with a person with limb girdle muscular dystrophy. The preliminary results are promising since all pilots (including the one with muscular dystrophy) are able to initiate and terminate assisted walking on demand. They are all able both to walk with a good stride rate and to reach moderate velocities. Healthy pilots are able to ambulate alone with the exoskeleton, while the pilot with muscular dystrophy requires human assistance for the management of balance

Humanoid Robots

For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion

Musical Haptics

Haptic Musical Instruments; Haptic Psychophysics; Interface Design and Evaluation; User Experience; Musical Performanc

Climbing and Walking Robots

Nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific researches. The shift of robotics researches from manufacturing to services applications is clear. During the last decades interest in studying climbing and walking robots has been increased. This increasing interest has been in many areas that most important ones of them are: mechanics, electronics, medical engineering, cybernetics, controls, and computers. Today’s climbing and walking robots are a combination of manipulative, perceptive, communicative, and cognitive abilities and they are capable of performing many tasks in industrial and non- industrial environments. Surveillance, planetary exploration, emergence rescue operations, reconnaissance, petrochemical applications, construction, entertainment, personal services, intervention in severe environments, transportation, medical and etc are some applications from a very diverse application fields of climbing and walking robots. By great progress in this area of robotics it is anticipated that next generation climbing and walking robots will enhance lives and will change the way the human works, thinks and makes decisions. This book presents the state of the art achievments, recent developments, applications and future challenges of climbing and walking robots. These are presented in 24 chapters by authors throughtot the world The book serves as a reference especially for the researchers who are interested in mobile robots. It also is useful for industrial engineers and graduate students in advanced study

Reconstructing the War in Iraq: Post-9/11 American War Fiction in Dialogue with Official-Media Discourse

This project examines American-authored Iraq War fiction within the context of public discourse. Given that modern, industrialized warfare is as much created by and through official-media discourse as represented by it, fictional accounts of Iraq exist not outside or separate from this discourse but rather in a dynamic, continually evolving relationship with it. The three texts explored in this study—Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk (2012), David Abrams’ Fobbit (2012), and Phil Klay’s Redeployment (2014)—thus do more than merely represent the war experience: operating always in conversation with how the war has been constructed, the novels and stories challenge what has and has not been made visible by those in power and how it has been rendered visible or invisible. At the same time, the texts perform a crucial intervention into the communication context, inhibiting the “discursive closure” (to quote Stanley Deetz) threatened by the unchecked perpetuation of prominent Iraq War narratives. At times directly and at others obliquely, the fictional narratives engage, interrogate, and critique official-media constructions of the Iraq War, thus challenging what has been accepted by the majority of American society as the reality of the conflict. By revising, repurposing, and undermining the vocabulary, structure, tropes, and techniques of dominant Iraq War discourse, the novels and stories I address in the following chapters alter the discursive landscape as they interact with it. Ultimately, these texts not only lay bare the construction of war-as-narrative but also make plain the lie that is the tidy, official version of the Iraq War, and their adaptations, both direct and indirect, of Vietnam War discourse suggest the contingent nature of all war narratives and the potential of fiction to serve as a positive intervening force in the cultural and political realities of the contemporary moment

Hitting Refresh: Regulating internet speech in the 21st century

By the mid-1990s, the internet had taken new form outside of its original military applications and became commercially available at an unprecedented rate. Western democracies recognized that such a new frontier, therefore, necessitated regulation. Their shared goal was to restrict objectionable content while simultaneously creating a pathway for this nascent industry to blossom. With this in mind, both the U.S. and European Union enacted linearly different and mutually exclusive regulatory regimes to govern “online intermediaries,” or sites like Facebook and Twitter that merely host the speech of their users. The E.U. enacted aggressive content removal statutes, while the U.S. offered nearly blanket immunity to these sites in the hope that the marketplace of ideas would dilute objectionable content. Using the U.S. and Germany as case studies, this thesis argues that, twenty years later, neither pathway emerged particularly victorious in their quest to curb the dissemination of radicalizing content. I find that the failure under the German preemptive framework derives from a contradictory monitoring obligation and lack of oversight by the European Commission on the state. Conversely, I find that the failure under the American deregulatory framework is rooted in a contradictory allocation of jurisdiction and a lack of oversight by the state upon intermediaries. By scrutinizing the incentive structures of both countries’ regulatory regimes, this thesis challenges the way Western democracies conceptualized and continue to conceptualize the internet and points out how neither extreme has responsively moderated internet speech

Musical Haptics

Haptic Musical Instruments; Haptic Psychophysics; Interface Design and Evaluation; User Experience; Musical Performanc

The Disinformation Age

Understanding the post-fact era requires going beyond foreign influence or the rise of social media. This examination of the origins and workings of the US disinformation system shows how political strategies and communication practices have undermined authoritative democratic institutions. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age

Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age is about why ordinary people in a democratizing state oppose democracy and how they leverage both traditional and social media to do so. Aim Sinpeng focuses on the people behind popular, large-scale antidemocratic movements that helped bring down democracy in 2006 and 2014 in Thailand. The yellow shirts (PAD—People’s Alliance for Democracy) that are the focus of the book are antidemocratic movements grown out of democratic periods in Thailand, but became the catalyst for the country’s democratic breakdown. Why, when, and how supporters of these movements mobilize offline and online to bring down democracy are some of the key questions that Sinpeng answers. While the book primarily uses a qualitative methodological approach, it also uses several quantitative tools to analyze social media data in the later chapters. This is one of few studies in the field of regime transition that focuses on antidemocratic mobilization and takes the role of social media seriously

Influence without Leverage? Anglo-American Relations and Intervention Post-9/11: the cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria

This thesis examines the evolution of Anglo-American relations in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (CA+MENA) region following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks from the perspective of the UK, the junior partner within the alliance. Building upon the work of Suzanne Nossel and Joseph Nye, this thesis develops the idea of smart power to understand how the UK has influenced US decision-making across four case studies of Anglo-American military intervention: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Moreover, it also incorporates the role of personality in the exercise of smart power, an element that has largely been overlooked in the literature to date. This thesis aims to answer the following core research question: how did the UK influence US intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria between 2001-2013? Proceeding from the hypothesis that the US-UK alliance has evolved post-9/11 with the UK projecting greater influence over US policy, this study gathers and analyses qualitative data, comprising 29 semi-structured interviews with British and American political elites, and over 120 primary source documents, including 55 political speeches and official statements, in developing its argument. The principal aim of this thesis is to reconceptualise and reinterpret the US-UK special relationship from a British perspective by using the framework of smart power to understand how the UK has influenced US foreign policy behaviour in Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa post-9/11. Moreover, this analysis contributes to the literature on Anglo-American relations and the study of power by providing a more nuanced understanding of the alliance that is more than just about the exercise of hard power, but emphasises the importance of the relations between leaders and their individual national role conceptions in the endurance of the alliance