In this paper we described the telepresence robot system designed to improve the well-being of elderly by supporting them to do daily activities independently, to facilitate social interaction in order to overcome a sense of social isolation and loneliness as well as to support the professional caregivers in everyday care. In order to investigate the acceptance of the developed robot system, evaluation study involved elderly people and professional caregivers, as two potential user groups was conducted. The results of this study are also presented and discussed.
The emerging demographic trends toward an aging population, demand new ways and solutions to improve the quality of elderly life. These include, prolonged independent living, improved health care, and reduced social isolation. Recent technological advances in the field of assistive robotics bring higher sophistication and various assistive abilities that can help in achieving these goals. In this paper, we present design and validation of a low-cost telepresence robot that can assist the elderly and their professional caregivers, in everyday activities. The developed robot structure and its control objectives were tested in, both, a simulation and experimental environment. On-field experiments were done in a private elderly care center involving elderly persons and caregivers as participants. The goal of the evaluation study was to test the software architecture and the robot capabilities for navigation, as well as the robot manipulator. Moreover, participants’ reactions toward a possible adoption of the developed robot system in everyday activities were assessed. The obtained results of the conducted evaluation study are also presented and discussed.
This paper describes the control architecture of a 10 DOF (Degrees of Freedom) lower limbs exoskeleton for the gait rehabilitation of patients with gait dysfunction. The system has 4 double‐acting rod pneumatic actuators (two for each leg) that control the hip and knee joints. The motion of each cylinder’s piston is controlled by two proportional pressure valves, connected to both cylinder chambers. The control strategy has been specifically designed in order to ensure a proper trajectory control for guiding patient’s legs along a fixed reference gait pattern. An adaptive fuzzy controller which is capable of compensating for the influence of the dry friction was successfully designed, implemented and tested on an embedded real‐time PC/104. In order to verify the proposed control architecture, laboratory experiments without a patient were carried out and the results are reported here and discussed
The main motivation of gait rehabilitation is to help a patient recovering from injury, illness or disease, to recover some locomotor abilities in order to promote as much independence as possible in activities of daily living tasks, and to assist the patient in compensating for deficits that cannot be treated medically. However, the amount of hands-on therapy that patients can receive is limited, as economic pressures are inherent in the health care system. Therefore, worldwide efforts are being made to automate locomotor training. Robotic devices has the potential to make therapy more affordable and thus more available for more patients and for more time. This article reviews the most important characteristics and features of the current robot devices for gait rehabilitation, both in clinical use and in the phase of research.
General TermsRobot rehabilitation.
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