Design and Control of Robotic Systems for Lower Limb Stroke Rehabilitation

Lower extremity stroke rehabilitation exhausts considerable health care resources, is labor intensive, and provides mostly qualitative metrics of patient recovery. To overcome these issues, robots can assist patients in physically manipulating their affected limb and measure the output motion. The robots that have been currently designed, however, provide assistance over a limited set of training motions, are not portable for in-home and in-clinic use, have high cost and may not provide sufficient safety or performance. This thesis proposes the idea of incorporating a mobile drive base into lower extremity rehabilitation robots to create a portable, inherently safe system that provides assistance over a wide range of training motions. A set of rehabilitative motion tasks were established and a six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) motion and force-sensing system was designed to meet high-power, large workspace, and affordability requirements. An admittance controller was implemented, and the feasibility of using this portable, low-cost system for movement assistance was shown through tests on a healthy individual. An improved version of the robot was then developed that added torque sensing and known joint elasticity for use in future clinical testing with a flexible-joint impedance controller

I-BaR: Integrated Balance Rehabilitation Framework

Neurological diseases are observed in approximately one billion people worldwide. A further increase is foreseen at the global level as a result of population growth and aging. Individuals with neurological disorders often experience cognitive, motor, sensory, and lower extremity dysfunctions. Thus, the possibility of falling and balance problems arise due to the postural control deficiencies that occur as a result of the deterioration in the integration of multi-sensory information. We propose a novel rehabilitation framework, Integrated Balance Rehabilitation (I-BaR), to improve the effectiveness of the rehabilitation with objective assessment, individualized therapy, convenience with different disability levels and adoption of an assist-as-needed paradigm and, with an integrated rehabilitation process as a whole, i.e., ankle-foot preparation, balance, and stepping phases, respectively. Integrated Balance Rehabilitation allows patients to improve their balance ability by providing multi-modal feedback: visual via utilization of Virtual Reality; vestibular via anteroposterior and mediolateral perturbations with the robotic platform; proprioceptive via haptic feedback.Comment: 37 pages, 2 figures, journal pape

Reimagining Robotic Walkers For Real-World Outdoor Play Environments With Insights From Legged Robots: A Scoping Review

PURPOSE For children with mobility impairments, without cognitive delays, who want to participate in outdoor activities, existing assistive technology (AT) to support their needs is limited. In this review, we investigate the control and design of a selection of robotic walkers while exploring a selection of legged robots to develop solutions that address this gap in robotic AT. METHOD We performed a comprehensive literature search from four main databases: PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore. The keywords used in the search were the following: “walker”, “rollator”, “smart walker”, “robotic walker”, “robotic rollator”. Studies were required to discuss the control or design of robotic walkers to be considered. A total of 159 papers were analyzed. RESULTS From the 159 papers, 127 were excluded since they failed to meet our inclusion criteria. The total number of papers analyzed included publications that utilized the same device, therefore we classified the remaining 32 studies into groups based on the type of robotic walker used. This paper reviewed 15 different types of robotic walkers. CONCLUSIONS The ability of many-legged robots to negotiate and transition between a range of unstructured substrates suggests several avenues of future consideration whose pursuit could benefit robotic AT, particularly regarding the present limitations of wheeled paediatric robotic walkers for children’s daily outside use. For more information: Kod*lab (link to kodlab.seas.upenn.edu

Rehabilitation Engineering

Population ageing has major consequences and implications in all areas of our daily life as well as other important aspects, such as economic growth, savings, investment and consumption, labour markets, pensions, property and care from one generation to another. Additionally, health and related care, family composition and life-style, housing and migration are also affected. Given the rapid increase in the aging of the population and the further increase that is expected in the coming years, an important problem that has to be faced is the corresponding increase in chronic illness, disabilities, and loss of functional independence endemic to the elderly (WHO 2008). For this reason, novel methods of rehabilitation and care management are urgently needed. This book covers many rehabilitation support systems and robots developed for upper limbs, lower limbs as well as visually impaired condition. Other than upper limbs, the lower limb research works are also discussed like motorized foot rest for electric powered wheelchair and standing assistance device

Impact of Ear Occlusion on In-Ear Sounds Generated by Intra-oral Behaviors

We conducted a case study with one volunteer and a recording setup to detect sounds induced by the actions: jaw clenching, tooth grinding, reading, eating, and drinking. The setup consisted of two in-ear microphones, where the left ear was semi-occluded with a commercially available earpiece and the right ear was occluded with a mouldable silicon ear piece. Investigations in the time and frequency domains demonstrated that for behaviors such as eating, tooth grinding, and reading, sounds could be recorded with both sensors. For jaw clenching, however, occluding the ear with a mouldable piece was necessary to enable its detection. This can be attributed to the fact that the mouldable ear piece sealed the ear canal and isolated it from the environment, resulting in a detectable change in pressure. In conclusion, our work suggests that detecting behaviors such as eating, grinding, reading with a semi-occluded ear is possible, whereas, behaviors such as clenching require the complete occlusion of the ear if the activity should be easily detectable. Nevertheless, the latter approach may limit real-world applicability because it hinders the hearing capabilities.</p