Empowering and assisting natural human mobility: The simbiosis walker

This paper presents the complete development of the Simbiosis Smart Walker. The device is equipped with a set of sensor subsystems to acquire user-machine interaction forces and the temporal evolution of user's feet during gait. The authors present an adaptive filtering technique used for the identification and separation of different components found on the human-machine interaction forces. This technique allowed isolating the components related with the navigational commands and developing a Fuzzy logic controller to guide the device. The Smart Walker was clinically validated at the Spinal Cord Injury Hospital of Toledo - Spain, presenting great acceptability by spinal chord injury patients and clinical staf

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 165, March 1977

This bibliography lists 198 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in February 1977

Biomechatronics: Harmonizing Mechatronic Systems with Human Beings

This eBook provides a comprehensive treatise on modern biomechatronic systems centred around human applications. A particular emphasis is given to exoskeleton designs for assistance and training with advanced interfaces in human-machine interaction. Some of these designs are validated with experimental results which the reader will find very informative as building-blocks for designing such systems. This eBook will be ideally suited to those researching in biomechatronic area with bio-feedback applications or those who are involved in high-end research on manmachine interfaces. This may also serve as a textbook for biomechatronic design at post-graduate level

Optimal Inertial Sensor Placement and Motion Detection for Epileptic Seizure Patient Monitoring

Use of inertial sensory systems to monitor and detect seizure episodes in patients suffering from epilepsy is investigated via numerical simulations and experiments. Numerical simulations employ a mathematical model that is able to predict human body dynamic responses during a typical epileptic seizure. An optimized inertial sensor placement procedure is developed to address achievement of highest possible sensing resolution in determining angular accelerations with minimal errors. In addition, a joint torque estimation procedure is formulated to assist in the future development of a possible detection scheme. Experimental motion data obtained from an epileptic seizure patient as well as a healthy subject via a cluster of inertial measurement sensors formed a basis for proposing a suitable detection scheme based on non-linear response analysis. In particular, preliminary experimental data analysis has shown that the proposed modified Poincaré Map based scheme can become an effective tool in detecting of seizure via inertial measurements

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Mobile Robots

The objective of this book is to cover advances of mobile robotics and related technologies applied for multi robot systems' design and development. Design of control system is a complex issue, requiring the application of information technologies to link the robots into a single network. Human robot interface becomes a demanding task, especially when we try to use sophisticated methods for brain signal processing. Generated electrophysiological signals can be used to command different devices, such as cars, wheelchair or even video games. A number of developments in navigation and path planning, including parallel programming, can be observed. Cooperative path planning, formation control of multi robotic agents, communication and distance measurement between agents are shown. Training of the mobile robot operators is very difficult task also because of several factors related to different task execution. The presented improvement is related to environment model generation based on autonomous mobile robot observations

A Hybrid-Powered Wireless System for Multiple Biopotential Monitoring

Chronic diseases are the top cause of human death in the United States and worldwide. A huge amount of healthcare costs is spent on chronic diseases every year. The high medical cost on these chronic diseases facilitates the transformation from in-hospital to out-of-hospital healthcare. The out-of-hospital scenarios require comfortability and mobility along with quality healthcare. Wearable electronics for well-being management provide good solutions for out-of-hospital healthcare. Long-term health monitoring is a practical and effective way in healthcare to prevent and diagnose chronic diseases. Wearable devices for long-term biopotential monitoring are impressive trends for out-of-hospital health monitoring. The biopotential signals in long-term monitoring provide essential information for various human physiological conditions and are usually used for chronic diseases diagnosis. This study aims to develop a hybrid-powered wireless wearable system for long-term monitoring of multiple biopotentials. For the biopotential monitoring, the non-contact electrodes are deployed in the wireless wearable system to provide high-level comfortability and flexibility for daily use. For providing the hybrid power, an alternative mechanism to harvest human motion energy, triboelectric energy harvesting, has been applied along with the battery to supply energy for long-term monitoring. For power management, an SSHI rectifying strategy associated with triboelectric energy harvester design has been proposed to provide a new perspective on designing TEHs by considering their capacitance concurrently. Multiple biopotentials, including ECG, EMG, and EEG, have been monitored to validate the performance of the wireless wearable system. With the investigations and studies in this project, the wearable system for biopotential monitoring will be more practical and can be applied in the real-life scenarios to increase the economic benefits for the health-related wearable devices

Physical Diagnosis and Rehabilitation Technologies

The book focuses on the diagnosis, evaluation, and assistance of gait disorders; all the papers have been contributed by research groups related to assistive robotics, instrumentations, and augmentative devices