People affected by Cerebral Palsy suffer from physical disabilities due to irreversible neural impairment since the very beginning of their life. Difficulties in motor control and coordination often relegate these patients to the use of a wheelchair and to the unavoidable upcoming of disuse syndromes. As pointed out in recent literature Damiano [7] physical exercise, especially in young ages, can have a deep impact on the patient health and quality of life. For training purposes is very important to keep an upright position, although in some severe cases this is not trivial. Many commercial mobile orthoses are designed to facilitate the standing, but not all the patients are able to deploy them. ARGO, the Active Reciprocated Gait Orthosis we developed, is a device that overcomes some of the limitations of these devices. It is an active device that is realized starting from a commercial reciprocated Gait Orthosis applying sensors and actuators to it. With ARGO we aim to develop a device for helping limbs in a non-coercive way accordingly to user&#x2019;s intention. In this way patients can drive the orthosis by themselves, deploying augmented biofeedback over movements. In fact Cerebral Palsy patients usually have weak biofeedback mechanisms and consequently are hardly inclined to learn movements. To achieve this behavior ARGO deploys a torque planning algorithm and a force control system. Data collected from a single case of study shows benefits of the orthosis. We will show that our test patient reaches complete autonomous walking after few hour of training with prototype.

A. Calanca

S. Piazza

P. Fiorini

A Motor Learning Oriented, Compliant and Mobile Gait Orthosis

This paper presents a gender and country-based analysis of the results of a multi-national survey questionnaire on the attitudes, requirements and preferences of blind and visually impaired people for a robotic guide. This is introduced by a brief summary of the findings of the survey introduced and reported in Part 1 and a brief overview of some of the technologies that are currently used in the construction of mobile robotic guides. An analysis of the gender dimension revealed very few differences in preferences or requirements between male and female respondents. There was also considerable commonality of preferences and requirements across the four countries, France, Italy, Spain and the UK, for which the comparative analysis was carried out. This implies that, at least initially, one robotic guide can be developed to be used in a number of different countries and by both women and men. The survey results were then applied to develop design specifications for a mobile robotic guide for blind and visually impaired people. The framework of the Comprehensive Assistive Technology (CAT) model developed by the authors was used to organise the information and structure the development of the design specifications. Further work will involve the construction of design mock-ups to implement the design specifications and their investigation with end-users to choose a design for further development.

Marion A. Hersh

Michael A. Johnson

A Robotic Guide for Blind People Part 2: Gender and National Analysis of a Multi-National Survey and the Application of the Survey Results and the Cat Model to Framing Robot Design Specifications

The design of a prosthetic wrist is the result of compromises between the function and the practicality of the device. Conventional prosthetic wrists use a single degree of freedom to produce pro/supination of the hand. It has not been demonstrated that this is the most functional alignment for a single axis. Previous work by the authors suggests that if the wrist must have only one rotatory axis then a more oblique orientation would be more functional. To test this idea, a compact wrist with a single axis and spherical design has been made that will allow any axis of rotation to be selected and the functional performance of the resulting arm be tested.

Arthur Zinck

&#xd8;yvind Stavdahl

Edmund Biden

Peter J. Kyberd

Design of a Compact, Reconfigurable, Prosthetic Wrist

This paper describes the development of a scooter supporting the mobility of older people. The scooter is equipped with a drive assistance system and a special scooter navigation system. The drive assistance system consists of a velocity controller, a steering controller, and a collision avoidance system. In this paper it is demonstrated how the challenging control and steering tasks are modified to increase safety for older people. A special scooter navigation system is presented, to support elderly people in navigating on a safe route through the city using sidewalks, pedestrian lights and crosswalks. For extended positioning requirements a hybrid positioning system was developed combining GPS, WLAN, and inertial sensor data. By combination of these technical improvements it is demonstrated how older people are able to preserve their self-determined and independent life. Usability research was done with focus groups in order to become familiar with global user demands and expectations towards a mobility assistance system. Results show that the system components are expected to assist the user in navigation, steering and speed control rather than to take complete control on the driving situation.

Daniel Eck

Klaus Schilling

Ahmad Abdul-Majeed

J&#xf6;rn Thielecke

Phillipp Richter

Javier Guti&#xe9;rrez Boronat

Irina Schens

Bernd Thomas

Bettina Williger

Frieder R. Lang

Mobility Assistance for Older People

This paper presents an exploration of the characteristics and structure of a cognitive architecture for control of
assisted living systems. The aspects of cognition considered are self-organization, communication, and inherited knowledge.
A cognitive solution for a related problem, function optimization, is developed because of the complexity and size of the assistive
living problem. Support for this approach stems from the artificial intelligence field where optimization is considered to be a
critical aspect of cognition, and from the similarity between the performance metrics for the two problem domains. A search
algorithm is developed using the bracketing and gradient methods as inherited knowledge. A key finding is that using a cognitive
structure caused the search to display aspects of the characteristics, behavior, and performance of human cognition. In terms of
performance, the cognitive search converges faster than either the bracketing or gradient searches alone, and its feasible problem
set is larger than the intersection of their individual sets. Similarly, human cognition acts quickly and can address a large set
of dissimilar problems. This gives confidence that the guidelines distilled from the development of the cognitive search can
produce a similar level of performance when applied to an assistive living system. However, this paper does not address the
details involved in actually implementing these guidelines on an assistive living system.

Alan Bowling

Fillia Makedon

Cognitive Optimization in Assistive Living System Development

The paper describes the implementation and testing of two adaptive controllers developed for a wearable, underactuated upper extremity therapy robot &#x2013; RUPERT (Robotic Upper Extremity Repetitive Trainer). The controllers developed in this study were used to implement two adaptive robotic therapy modes &#x2013; the adaptive co-operative mode and the adaptive active-assist mode &#x2013; that are based on two different approaches for providing robotic assistance for task practice. The adaptive active-assist mode completes therapy tasks when a subject is unable to do so voluntarily. This robotic therapy mode is a novel implementation of the idea of an active-assist therapy mode; it utilizes the measure of a subject&#x2019;s motor ability, along with their real-time movement kinematics to initiate robotic assistance at the appropriate time during a movement trial. The adaptive co-operative mode, on the other hand, is based on the idea of enabling task completion instead of completing the task for the subject. Both these therapy modes were designed to adapt to a stroke subject's motor ability, and thus encourage voluntary participation from the stroke subject. The two controllers were tested on three stroke subjects practicing robot-assisted reaching movements. The results from this testing demonstrate that an underactuated wearable exoskeleton, such as RUPERT, can be used for administering robot-assisted therapy, in a manner that encourages voluntary participation from the subject undergoing therapy.

Sivakumar Balasubramanian

Jiping He

Adaptive Control of a Wearable Exoskeleton for Upper-Extremity Neurorehabilitation

In this work, an innovative robotic solution for human care and assistance is presented. Our main objective is to develop a new concept of portable robot able to support the elderly and those people with different levels of disability during the execution of daily tasks, such as washing their face or hands, brushing their teeth, combing their hair, eating, drinking, and bringing objects closer, among others. Our prototype, ASIBOT, is a five degrees of freedom (DOF) self-contained manipulator that includes the control system and electronic equipment on board. The main advantages of the robot are its light weight, about 11 kg for a 1.3 m reach, its autonomy, and its ability to move between different points (docking stations) of the room or from the environment to a wheelchair and vice versa, which facilitates its supportive functions. The functional evaluation of ASIBOT is addressed in this paper. For this purpose the robotic arm is tested in different experiments with disabled people, gathering and discussing the results according to a methodology that allows us to assess users' satisfaction.

Alberto Jard&#xf3;n

Concepci&#xf3;n A. Monje

Carlos Balaguer

Functional Evaluation of Asibot: A New Approach on Portable Robotic System for Disabled People

This paper introduces a novel concept on reading assistive technologies for the blind: the TactoBook, a system that is able to translate entire electronic books (eBooks) to Braille code and to reproduce them in portable electronic Braille terminals. The TactoBook consists of a computer-based translator that converts fast and automatically any eBook into Braille. The Braille version of the eBook is then encrypted as a file and stored in a USB memory drive which is later inserted and reproduced in a compact, lightweight, and highly-portable tactile terminal. In particular, this paper presents a piezoelectric ultrasonic actuation approach to design and implement such portable Braille terminal. Actuating mechanism, design concept, first prototype, and performance results are presented and discussed.

Ramiro Vel&#xe1;zquez

Hermes Hern&#xe1;ndez

Enrique Preza

A Portable Piezoelectric Tactile Terminal for Braille Readers

This paper presents a study on the usage of different informative modalities as biofeedbacks of a perceptual supplementation device aiming at reducing overpressure at the buttock area. Visual, audio and lingual electrotactile modalities are analysed and compared with a non-biofeedback session. In conclusion, sensory modalities have a positive and equal effect, but they are not equally judged in terms of comfort and disturbance with some other activities.

Olivier Chenu

Yohan Payan

P. Hlavackova

Jacques Demongeot

Francis Cannard

Bruno Diot

Nicolas Vuillerme

Pressure Sores Prevention for Paraplegic People: Effects of Visual, Auditory and Tactile Supplementations on Overpressures Distribution in Seated Posture

About this journal

Applied Bionics and Biomechanics publishes original research articles as well as review articles that seek to understand the mechanics of biological systems, or that use the functions of living organisms as inspiration for the design of new devices.

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Chief Editor, Professor Qiguo Rong, is the Vice Chair of the Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science at Peking University, China. His research focuses on the biomechanical behaviors of musculoskeletal systems.

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Applied Bionics and Biomechanics

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