Human-activity-centered measurement system:challenges from laboratory to the real environment in assistive gait wearable robotics

Assistive gait wearable robots (AGWR) have shown a great advancement in developing intelligent devices to assist human in their activities of daily living (ADLs). The rapid technological advancement in sensory technology, actuators, materials and computational intelligence has sped up this development process towards more practical and smart AGWR. However, most assistive gait wearable robots are still confined to be controlled, assessed indoor and within laboratory environments, limiting any potential to provide a real assistance and rehabilitation required to humans in the real environments. The gait assessment parameters play an important role not only in evaluating the patient progress and assistive device performance but also in controlling smart self-adaptable AGWR in real-time. The self-adaptable wearable robots must interactively conform to the changing environments and between users to provide optimal functionality and comfort. This paper discusses the performance parameters, such as comfortability, safety, adaptability, and energy consumption, which are required for the development of an intelligent AGWR for outdoor environments. The challenges to measuring the parameters using current systems for data collection and analysis using vision capture and wearable sensors are presented and discussed

Stand-alone wearable system for ubiquitous real-time monitoring of muscle activation potentials

Wearable technology is attracting most attention in healthcare for the acquisition of physiological signals. We propose a stand-alone wearable surface ElectroMyoGraphy (sEMG) system for monitoring the muscle activity in real time. With respect to other wearable sEMG devices, the proposed system includes circuits for detecting the muscle activation potentials and it embeds the complete real-time data processing, without using any external device. The system is optimized with respect to power consumption, with a measured battery life that allows for monitoring the activity during the day. Thanks to its compactness and energy autonomy, it can be used outdoor and it provides a pathway to valuable diagnostic data sets for patients during their own day-life. Our system has performances that are comparable to state-of-art wired equipment in the detection of muscle contractions with the advantage of being wearable, compact, and ubiquitous

Wearable sensors system for an improved analysis of freezing of gait in Parkinson's disease using electromyography and inertial signals

We propose a wearable sensor system for automatic, continuous and ubiquitous analysis of Freezing of Gait (FOG), in patients affected by Parkinson's disease. FOG is an unpredictable gait disorder with different clinical manifestations, as the trembling and the shuffling-like phenotypes, whose underlying pathophysiology is not fully understood yet. Typical trembling-like subtype features are lack of postural adaptation and abrupt trunk inclination, which in general can increase the fall probability. The targets of this work are detecting the FOG episodes, distinguishing the phenotype and analyzing the muscle activity during and outside FOG, toward a deeper insight in the disorder pathophysiology and the assessment of the fall risk associated to the FOG subtype. To this aim, gyroscopes and surface electromyography integrated in wearable devices sense simultaneously movements and action potentials of antagonist leg muscles. Dedicated algorithms allow the timely detection of the FOG episode and, for the first time, the automatic distinction of the FOG phenotypes, which can enable associating a fall risk to the subtype. Thanks to the possibility of detecting muscles contractions and stretching exactly during FOG, a deeper insight into the pathophysiological underpinnings of the different phenotypes can be achieved, which is an innovative approach with respect to the state of art

Real-time human ambulation, activity, and physiological monitoring:taxonomy of issues, techniques, applications, challenges and limitations

Automated methods of real-time, unobtrusive, human ambulation, activity, and wellness monitoring and data analysis using various algorithmic techniques have been subjects of intense research. The general aim is to devise effective means of addressing the demands of assisted living, rehabilitation, and clinical observation and assessment through sensor-based monitoring. The research studies have resulted in a large amount of literature. This paper presents a holistic articulation of the research studies and offers comprehensive insights along four main axes: distribution of existing studies; monitoring device framework and sensor types; data collection, processing and analysis; and applications, limitations and challenges. The aim is to present a systematic and most complete study of literature in the area in order to identify research gaps and prioritize future research directions