The emergence of care robotics: A publication and patent analysis

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The emergence of care robotics - A patent and publication analysis

Care robots are a means to support elderly people affected by physical or mental handicaps to remain as autonomous as possible or regain already lost autonomy (e.g. running stairs). They also support care-takers when working with handicapped. We review the emergence of care robotics and particularly offer answers to two research questions: Which organizations and individuals in which countries have been and are active in research and development? How has research and development emerged with regard to activity focus, intensity levels and cooperation? The analysis rests on PATSTAT patent and ISI Web of Science publication data. Bibliographic and network analyses are conducted on country, organization (i.e. universities and firms) and individual levels. We find that care robotics research and development activities have constantly increased since the late 1970s. Today Japanese universities and firms are the most active players, while in early stages US and European organizations pioneered care robotics research. Starting from six disjunctive small networks, several highly interconnected care robotics research networks have evolved. However, most cooperation clusters are still found within the same country. Only few international hubs emerged. Among them are two Japanese organizations (ATR, AIST) and Carnegie Mellon University, US.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004016251400275

The Middlesex University rehabilitation robot

This paper outlines the historical developments of Wheelchair-Mounted Robot Arms (WMRA's) and then focuses on the ongoing research at Middlesex to develop a low-cost aid to daily living for users with high-level quadriplegia. A detailed review is given explaining the design specification. It describes the construction of the robotic device and its control architecture. The prototype robot used several gesture recognition and other input systems. The prototype has been tested on disabled and non-disabled users with positive feedback. They observed that it was easy to use, but issues about speed of operation were resolved after further development. The robot has a payload of greater than 1kg with a maximum reach of 0.7–0.9m. Published by the Taylor & Francis Publishing Group, this publication is one of the only journals to cover the multi-disciplinary area of medical technology research. Currently, research bids are being formulated with the School of Computing Science to continue this research

The design and evaluation of an interface and control system for a scariculated rehabilitation robot arm

This thesis is concerned with the design and development of a prototype implementation of a Rehabilitation Robotic manipulator based on a novel kinematic configuration. The initial aim of the research was to identify appropriate design criteria for the design of a user interface and control system, and for the subsequent evaluation of the manipulator prototype. This led to a review of the field of rehabilitation robotics, focusing on user evaluations of existing systems. The review showed that the design objectives of individual projects were often contradictory, and that a requirement existed for a more general and complete set of design criteria. These were identified through an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of existing systems, including an assessment of manipulator performances, commercial success and user feedback. The resulting criteria were used for the design and development of a novel interface and control system for the Middlesex Manipulator - the novel scariculated robotic system. A highly modular architecture was adopted, allowing the manipulator to provide a level of adaptability not approached by existing rehabilitation robotic systems. This allowed the interface to be configured to match the controlling ability and input device selections of individual users. A range of input devices was employed, offering variation in communication mode and bandwidth. These included a commercial voice recognition system, and a novel gesture recognition device. The later was designed using electrolytic tilt sensors, the outputs of which were encoded by artificial neural networks. These allowed for control of the manipulator through head or hand gestures. An individual with spinal-cord injury undertook a single-subject user evaluation of the Middlesex Manipulator over a period of four months. The evaluation provided evidence for the value of adaptability presented by the user interface. It was also shown that the prototype did not currently confonn to all the design criteria, but allowed for the identification of areas for design improvements. This work led to a second research objective, concerned with the problem of configuring an adaptable user interface for a specific individual. A novel form of task analysis is presented within the thesis, that allows the relative usability of interface configurations to be predicted based upon individual user and input device characteristics. An experiment was undertaken with 6 subjects performing 72 tasks runs with 2 interface configurations controlled by user gestures. Task completion times fell within the range predicted, where the range was generated using confidence intervals (α = 0.05) on point estimates of user and device characteristics. This allowed successful prediction over all task runs of the relative task completion times of interface configurations for a given user

SVILUPPO DI DISPOSITIVI APTICI E USO DI REALTÀ VIRTUALE PER LA RIABILITAZIONE DELLA MANO E DELLE DITA

In the past decade, there has been an increasing attention for the development of personal and rehabilitation robots to assist, enhance, and quantify the rehabilitation therapy. This interest is expected to continue due to the improvements in health care that will allow people to live longer. A promising approach is the use of virtual reality in combination with haptic devices, i.e. manipulators that are capable of providing realistic force stimuli and accurate measurements of user’s movements, to treat the disability induced by stroke or chronic musculo-skeletal pathologies. The use of this technology not only helps to recover lost motor skills, but allows to obtain objective information on the rehabilitation process. In this research we have investigated the application of this approach in hand/finger rehabilitation of stroke patients. The first objective has been the development of a software framework that could support the flexibility and adaptability required by the addressed applications. Indeed, rehabilitation exercises have to be adapted to the patient disability, different devices must be integrated depending on the target of the rehabilitation, and different quantitative inforamtion should be recorded according to the objective of the trainign session. Based on the available tools, a software framework was developed using the Model/View/Controller software pattern that allows to decouple the different modules composing the application. Three main components were developed, namely: device management, virtual environment state evolution, and user interface. To reduce the cost, the framework was implemented only through the use of freely available libraries. The software framework was then used to develop a prototype application based on a five-bar linkage haptic device. During its development we paid special attention to the medial device regulations. Two main areas were identified as the most critical ones: the mechanical and physiological safety. A mechanical protection barrier for the hand/finger device was developed to ensure safe use by the user. At the same time, we investigated how to pursue physiological safey, i.e. how to monitor patients fatigue through the analysis of their physiological signals. When the patient enters a state of fatigue, it is necessary to change the intensity of the exercise according to the rehabilitation needs of the patient. The recognition of such state is a further element to be monitored during the control loop of the device, and that should be integrated in the analysis in real time. A first attempt to recognize the satte of fatigue was the observation of changes in the frequency band of electromyographic signals (EMG) of the patient. A framework for the acquisition of electromyographic signals, interfacing the rehabilitation system with an EMG amplifier, was developed. In the last part of the research, we investigated a different strategy for acquiring physiological signals of patient fatigue using the analysis of electroencephalographic signals (EEG). From an in-depth analysis of related literature, a software framework to integrate the analysis of EEG signals within the rehabilitation device conrol was identified. Additionally, a set of indexes for the definition of the level of mental fatigue of the patient was also designed