The demand for rehabilitation services is growing apace with the graying of the population. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), senior citizens at least 65 years of age will increase in number by 88% in the coming years. By 2050, the United States’ contingent of seniors is expected to double from approximately 40 to 80 million. With this increase comes increased incidence of age-related disorders. The following is an example.

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Walking on irregular surfaces and in the presence of unexpected events is a challenging problem for bipedal machines. Up to date, their ability to cope with gait disturbances is far less successful than humans’: Neither trajectory controlled robots, nor dynamic walking machines (Limit CycleWalkers) are able to handle them satisfactorily. On the contrary, humans reject gait perturbations naturally and efficiently relying on their sensory organs that, if needed, elicit a recovery action. A similar approach may be envisioned for bipedal robots and exoskeletons: An algorithm continuously observes the state of the walker and, if an unexpected event happens, triggers an adequate reaction. This paper presents a monitoring algorithm that provides immediate detection of any type of perturbation based solely on a phase representation of the normal walking of the robot. The proposed method was evaluated in a Limit Cycle Walker prototype that suffered push and trip perturbations at different moments of the gait cycle, providing 100% successful detections for the current experimental apparatus and adequately tuned parameters, with no false positives when the robot is walking unperturbed.

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Commercial motion-capture systems produce excellent in-studio reconstructions, but offer no comparable solution for acquisition in everyday environments. We present a system for acquiring motions almost anywhere. This wearable system gathers ultrasonic time-of-flight and inertial measurements with a set of inexpensive miniature sensors worn on the garment. After recording, the information is combined using an Extended Kalman Filter to reconstruct joint configurations of a body. Experimental results show that even motions that are traditionally difficult to acquire are recorded with ease within their natural settings. Although our prototype does not reliably recover the global transfor-mation, we show that the resulting motions are visually similar to the original ones, and that the combined acoustic and inertial system reduces the drift commonly observed in purely inertial systems. Our final results suggest that this system could become a versatile input device for a variety of augmented-reality applications.

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There is a small but growing population of people who suffer from impaired balance. The causes range from old age to stroke to cerebral palsy. For those with only minor problems staying upright, a cane or walker is all that is needed. For some it is so debilitating that they are confined to a wheel chair. The precise cause of impairment can vary. In some, the vestibular, proprio-ceptive or visual impairments affect balance. In others, muscle weakness or brain damage is the cause. In another group, the brain never learned to balance in the first place. Relearning how to balance can be a struggle requiring months of costly physical therapy with a physical therapist. A machine that could help teach them how to balance would be a great help in the improvement of their lives. This thesis presents a set of control models for an exoskeleton that will stabilize and restore stability to those with impaired balance. The control models are designed for an exoskeleton to initially force the wearer into a known profile for balancing and moving. There will then be a steady reduction in the authority of the exo-skeleton over time, requiring the patient to assert more control over his or her own movement. As the authority of the exoskeleton is reduced, the patient will have to increase his or her own authority and develop his or her own control law or the patient will become less stable and eventually unbalanced. We expect this treatment method will increase the stability of patients, allowing them to steadily adapt to standing and walking. This will then allow them mobility without the use of a wheel chair and decrease their risk of falling. Further, the use of this device will enable the patients to receive therapy at home and in their normal life without the need to visit a physical therapist for rehabilitation, enabling the patients to receive therapy at home and for a longer period of time than they currently do.

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A motor that delivers high force linear motion or high torque rotary motion to a moving element. The motor may include a driving brake, a driver, a holding brake and a flexible moving element. Operation of the motor may involve activating the holding brake, activating the driver to flex the moving element, activating the holding brake to maintain the position of a portion of the moving element, releasing the driving brake, and restoring the moving element to an unflexed position. The elements are arranged to provide linear motion, belt-driven rotary motion, or directly-coupled rotary motion using brakes and drivers arranged in linear or circular fashion. Drivers may be linear or rotary actuators or motors based on electrostatic, piezoelectric, magnetic, or electrostrictive properties. The brakes may be applied through electrostatic forces, magnetic forces, or mechanical gears engaged with a linear or rotary driving mechanism.

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