Human-Exoskeleton Joint Misalignment: A Systematic Review

Mallat, Randa; Khalil, Mohamad; Venture, Gentiane; Bonnet, Vincent; Mohammed, Samer

doi:10.1109/icabme47164.2019.8940321

Cited by 36 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Transparency and comfort have been improved by adding passive degrees of freedom, that release hyperstatic constraints, in the connections' design. 14,28,29 Furthermore, approaches based on human movement prediction are promising for previously known 19 or repetitive movements, 30 but their extension to a wider range of behaviours is still a challenge due to the difficulty of predicting the user's intended movement in general settings. In another approach, the use of force sensors could be relevant to allow the exoskeleton to follow the user's movements by directly minimising the interaction forces.…”

Section: Assess and Improve Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

An Identification-Based Method Improving the Transparency of a Robotic Upper Limb Exoskeleton

et al. 2021

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SUMMARY Over the past decade, research on human–robot collaboration has grown exponentially, motivated by appealing applications to improve the daily life of patients/operators. A primary requirement in many applications is to implement highly “transparent” control laws to reduce the robot impact on human movement. This impact may be quantified through relevant motor control indices. In this paper, we show that control laws based on careful identification procedures improve transparency compared to classical closed-loop position control laws. A new performance index based on the ratio between electromyographic activity and limb acceleration is also introduced to assess the quality of human exoskeleton interaction.

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Section: Assess and Improve Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

An Identification-Based Method Improving the Transparency of a Robotic Upper Limb Exoskeleton

et al. 2021

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“…Forces that are not compensated for in the design of the robot or its interface will be transmitted to the musculoskeletal systems. If torques and forces are very high or acting in arbitrary directions on the musculoskeletal system, they can cause overloading and thereby pain and injuries to bones, joints and muscles (He et al, 2017;Mallat et al, 2019).…”

Section: Misalignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Safety Assessment of Rehabilitation Robots: A Review Identifying Safety Skills and Current Knowledge Gaps

et al. 2021

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The assessment of rehabilitation robot safety is a vital aspect of the development process, which is often experienced as difficult. There are gaps in best practices and knowledge to ensure safe usage of rehabilitation robots. Currently, safety is commonly assessed by monitoring adverse events occurrence. The aim of this article is to explore how safety of rehabilitation robots can be assessed early in the development phase, before they are used with patients. We are suggesting a uniform approach for safety validation of robots closely interacting with humans, based on safety skills and validation protocols. Safety skills are an abstract representation of the ability of a robot to reduce a specific risk or deal with a specific hazard. They can be implemented in various ways, depending on the application requirements, which enables the use of a single safety skill across a wide range of applications and domains. Safety validation protocols have been developed that correspond to these skills and consider domain-specific conditions. This gives robot users and developers concise testing procedures to prove the mechanical safety of their robotic system, even when the applications are in domains with a lack of standards and best practices such as the healthcare domain. Based on knowledge about adverse events occurring in rehabilitation robot use, we identified multi-directional excessive forces on the soft tissue level and musculoskeletal level as most relevant hazards for rehabilitation robots and related them to four safety skills, providing a concrete starting point for safety assessment of rehabilitation robots. We further identified a number of gaps which need to be addressed in the future to pave the way for more comprehensive guidelines for rehabilitation robot safety assessments. Predominantly, besides new developments of safety by design features, there is a strong need for reliable measurement methods as well as acceptable limit values for human-robot interaction forces both on skin and joint level.

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“…Even though the ranges of motion of hip/knee/ankle joints are rather limited, they are able to move in the medial–lateral direction as well as the anterior–posterior direction. Namely, the hip/knee/ankle joints are not perfect spherical joints, but their movements are still closer to those of the spherical joints [ 27 , 28 ]. Therefore, the kinematic discrepancy can cause unnatural walking and discomfort in the wearer during daily activities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spine-like Joint Link Mechanism to Design Wearable Assistive Devices

Kim

Cho

Kim

et al. 2022

Sensors

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When we develop wearable assistive devices, comfort and support are two main issues that need to be considered. In conventional design approaches, the degree of freedom of the wearer’s joint movements tends to be oversimplified. Accordingly, the wearer’s motion becomes restrained and bone/ligament injuries might occur in case of an unexpected fall. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes a novel joint link mechanism inspired by a human spine structure as well as functionalities. The key feature of the proposed spine-like joint link mechanism is that hemispherical blocks are concatenated via flexible synthetic fiber lines so that their concatenation stiffness can be adjusted according to a tensile force. This feature has a great potentiality for designing a wearable assistive device that can support aged people’s sit-to-stand action or augment spinal motion by regulating the concatenation stiffness. In addition, the concatenated hemispherical blocks enable the wearer to move his/her joint with full freedom, which in turn increases the wearer’s mobility and prevents joint misalignment. The experimental results with a testbed and a pilot wearer substantiated that the spine-like joint link mechanism can serve as a key component in the design of wearable assistive devices for better mobility.

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Human-Exoskeleton Joint Misalignment: A Systematic Review

Cited by 36 publications

References 30 publications

An Identification-Based Method Improving the Transparency of a Robotic Upper Limb Exoskeleton

An Identification-Based Method Improving the Transparency of a Robotic Upper Limb Exoskeleton

Safety Assessment of Rehabilitation Robots: A Review Identifying Safety Skills and Current Knowledge Gaps

Spine-like Joint Link Mechanism to Design Wearable Assistive Devices

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