The constant growth of the population with mobility impairments has led to the development of several gait assistance devices. Among these, smart walkers have emerged to provide physical and ...cognitive interactions during rehabilitation and assistance therapies, by means of robotic and electronic technologies. In this sense, this paper presents the development and implementation of a human-robot-environment interface on a robotic platform that emulates a smart walker, the
. The interface includes modules such as a navigation system, a human detection system, a safety rules system, a user interaction system, a social interaction system and a set of autonomous and shared control strategies. The interface was validated through several tests on healthy volunteers with no gait impairments. The platform performance and usability was assessed, finding natural and intuitive interaction over the implemented control strategies.
Smart walkers are commonly used as potential gait assistance devices, to provide physical and cognitive assistance within rehabilitation and clinical scenarios. To understand such rehabilitation ...processes, several biomechanical studies have been conducted to assess human gait with passive and active walkers. Several sessions were conducted with 11 healthy volunteers to assess three interaction strategies based on passive, low and high mechanical stiffness values on the AGoRA Smart Walker. The trials were carried out in a motion analysis laboratory. Kinematic data were also collected from the smart walker sensory interface. The interaction force between users and the device was recorded. The force required under passive and low stiffness modes was 56.66% and 67.48% smaller than the high stiffness mode, respectively. An increase of 17.03% for the hip range of motion, as well as the highest trunk's inclination, were obtained under the resistive mode, suggesting a compensating motion to exert a higher impulse force on the device. Kinematic and physical interaction data suggested that the high stiffness mode significantly affected the users' gait pattern. Results suggested that users compensated their kinematics, tilting their trunk and lower limbs to exert higher impulse forces on the device.
Socially Assistive Robotics has emerged as a potential tool for rehabilitating cognitive and developmental disorders in children with autism. Social robots found in the literature are often able to ...teach critical social skills, such as emotion recognition and physical interaction. Even though there are promising results in clinical studies, there is a lack of guidelines on selecting the appropriate robot and how to design and implement the child-robot interaction.
This work aims to evaluate the impacts of a social robot designed with three different appearances according to the results of a participatory design (PD) process with the community. A validation study in the emotion recognition task was carried out with 21 children with autism.
Spectrum disorder results showed that robot-like appearances reached a higher percentage of children's attention and that participants performed better when recognizing simple emotions, such as happiness and sadness.
This study offers empirical support for continuing research on using SAR to promote social interaction with children with ASD. Further long-term research will help to identify the differences between high and low-functioning children.
The constant growth of pathologies affecting human mobility has led to developing of different assistive devices to provide physical and cognitive assistance. Smart walkers are a particular type of ...these devices since they integrate navigation systems, path-following algorithms, and user interaction modules to ensure natural and intuitive interaction. Although these functionalities are often implemented in rehabilitation scenarios, there is a need to actively involve the healthcare professionals in the interaction loop while guaranteeing safety for them and patients. This work presents the validation of two visual feedback strategies for the teleoperation of a simulated robotic walker during an assisted navigation task. For this purpose, a group of 14 clinicians from the rehabilitation area formed the validation group. A simple path-following task was proposed, and the feedback strategies were assessed through the kinematic estimation error (KTE) and a usability survey. A KTE of 0.28 m was obtained for the feedback strategy on the joystick. Additionally, significant differences were found through a Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon test for the perception of behavior and confidence towards the joystick according to the modes of interaction (p-values of 0.04 and 0.01, respectively). The use of visual feedback with this tool contributes to research areas such as remote management of therapies and monitoring rehabilitation of people’s mobility.
The constant growth of the population with mobility impairments, such as older adults and people suffering from neurological pathologies like Parkinson's disease (PD), has encouraged the development ...of multiple devices for gait assistance. Robotic walkers have emerged, improving physical stability and balance and providing cognitive aid in rehabilitation scenarios. Different studies evaluated human gait behavior with passive and active walkers to understand such rehabilitation processes. However, there is no evidence in the literature of studies with robotic walkers in daily living scenarios with older adults with Parkinson's disease. This study presents the assessment of the AGoRA Smart Walker using Ramps Tests and Timed Up and Go Test (TUGT). Ten older adults participated in the study, four had PD, and the remaining six had underlying conditions and fractures. Each of them underwent a physical assessment (i.e., Senior Fitness, hip, and knee strength tests) and then interacted with the AGoRA SW. Kinematic and physical interaction data were collected through the AGoRA walker's sensory interface. It was found that for lower limb strength tests, older adults with PD had increases of at least 15% in all parameters assessed. For the Sit to Stand Test, the Parkinson's group evidenced an increase of 23%, while for the Chair Sit and Reach Test (CSRT), this same group was only 0.04 m away from reaching the target. For the Ramp Up Test (RUT), the subjects had to make a greater effort, and significant differences (
= 0.04) were evidenced in the force they applied to the device. For the Ramp Down Test (RDT), the Parkinson's group exhibited a decrease in torque, and there were statistically significant differences (
= 0.01) due to the increase in the complexity of the task. In the Timed Up and Go Test (TUGT), the subjects presented significant differences in torque (
of 0.05) but not in force (
of 0.22) due to the effect of the admittance controller implemented in the study. Finally, the results suggested that the walker, represents a valuable tool for assisting people with gait motor deficits in tasks that demanded more physical effort adapting its behavior to the specific needs of each user.
Despite the increasing popularity of the cloud robotics paradigm, the literature on the field still lacks comprehensive analysis on several aspects of the technology. Therefore, the adoption of ...common standards and frameworks is fundamental for developing the field and allowing practical works to be reproduced and compared. This work presents a ROS-based open framework for robot-cloud communication, easing the integration of robotics and remote cloud platforms, and discusses the implementation of the overall cloud robotics stack over open source software and commercial off-the-shelf devices. Additionally, we present two practical implementations in which most of the computation is carried out remotely and perform a series of experiments to demonstrate our technique. Our results indicate that task times can be reduced up to 15% when using remote cloud platforms even under 150 ms average communication latency over the public Internet while observing figures as low as 2% on throughput loss in sensor data transmission. In general, such results point to the feasibility of the presented approach in different classes of applications, even under non-ideal network and cloud settings.
•Introduce an open framework based on ROS for robot-cloud communication.•Our framework requires no external network configuration for use over the Internet.•Propose a repeatable methodology for implementing cloud robotics.•Our work is validated considering different applications and cloud platforms setups.•Cloud computation can outperform embedded computation even in complex networks.
In recent years, advances in robotics and the constant growth of gait-related pathologies led to the development of different assistive devices. Smart walkers provide natural and intuitive strategies ...for gait assistance, such as path-following and guidance. Although these functionalities usually employ shared control approaches, the users' level of participation has yet to be assessed. This work presents the implementation of three modulation strategies for assisted navigation tasks. A path-following algorithm and a set of admittance-based controllers modulate the control authority between the user and the device. A group of 20 healthy subjects formed the validation group. Results showed a kinematic estimation error of 0.13 m for the strategy that shared the control authority with the user. Statistical tests found significant differences regarding the naturalness of the proposed approach (p-value of 0.00587).
Recent implementations of sensory systems have addressed gait characterization in several assistive, rehabilitation and human-robot interaction scenarios. Sensors such as laser rangefinders, force ...platforms and motion tracking systems have been widely used to achieve legs' position tracking, as well as to estimate gait spatio-temporal parameters. However, the validation of those measurements with a gold standard system is still lacking. In this sense, this work is aimed at proposing an online system for the estimation of gait parameters for walker-assisted gait with smart or robotic devices. Moreover, a validation study with an optoelectronic system was carried out. A group of 30 healthy volunteers was recruited. The trials were performed on a treadmill, where the subjects were asked to walk at 4 different speeds. The proposed system is equipped with a laser rangefinder to calculate the users' legs position. Additionally, two adaptive filters, as well as a linear mathematical model were used to adjust the estimations of the users' gait parameters. Results show that our proposed system is able to estimate the stride cadence and the step length with an error lower than 5% compared with the gold standard system.
This work presents a multimodal cognitive interaction strategy aiming at walker-assisted rehabilitation therapies, with special focus on post-stroke patients. Such interaction strategy is based on ...monitoring user's gait and face orientation to command the displacement of the smart walker. Users are able to actively command the steering of the walker by changing their face orientation, while their lower limbs movement affect the walker's linear velocity. The proposed system is validated using a smart walker and the results obtained point to the feasibility of employing such cognitive interaction in rehabilitation therapies.
Lower-limb exoskeletons and smart walkers are robotic devices to assist patients in regaining their autonomy after a stroke. The integration of these devices enables gait rehabilitation and ...functional compensation, promoting natural over-ground walking. This article presents the Adaptable Robotic Platform for Gait Rehabilitation and Assistance (AGoRA V2 platform), which integrates the new AGoRA V2 Smart Walker and the AGoRA V2 unilateral lower-limb exoskeleton. It was evaluated with 14 healthy subjects using physiological and kinematic variables and a perception assessment. The study entailed four conditions: Without exoskeleton (WOE), With Exoskeleton (WE&T), With Walker (WW), and With Platform (WP). Results indicate a reduction in the muscle activity of the Rectus Femoris (18%) and Vastus Lateralis (15%), comparing WE&T and WP, as well as walking without any device (WOE) and using any robotic device (WE&T, WW, WP). Results suggest the importance of combining the exoskeleton with the robotic walker and the assistance of each device independently. Moreover, using the complete platform induces slower gait patterns than the walker, as the mean impulse force and linear velocity decrease by 42% and 44%, respectively. These results demonstrate that the platform contributes to safety, and improvements in gait parameters and muscular activity, indicating the system's potential to act as a modular device according to users' conditions and therapeutic goals.
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