As modern society becomes increasingly more elderly, developing specialized equipment to help assist this growing population in everyday tasks becomes more and more important. Here we have developed a passive gravity balanced arm support system called the «Arm-Balancer». It was designed to assist the arm motion of elderly people with disabilities. The objective of this study is to determine the utility of the «Arm-Balancer». We will evaluate the effect of this device on the arm muscle tension of the user. The «Arm-Balancer» is supported by a gas spring to eliminate gravity and may be attached to a chair, a bed or used on the floor when attached to the «Tatami Mat» seat. The «Arm-Balancer» consists of a two-segment exoskeleton designed for the users upper arm and forearm. The links are made from stainless steel rods whose lengths are designed to parallel the lengths of the users upper arm and forearm. The upper arm segment is telescopic so the length can be adjusted to the size of the users. Driving the evaluation we determined that the «Arm Balancer» had an assistive force of 10N to the arm and 5N to the wrist. Some elderly people with disabilities were receptive to the «Arm Balancer» while others were ambivalent.

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This paper presents a system-level approach to the design of a safety-critical robotic system that is sufficiently safe to satisfy human-subject safety criteria. This system design approach utilizes preliminary hazard analysis, and fault tree analysis, and was successfully applied to a dexterous space robot designed to fly on NASA’s space shuttle. An application of this approach to a shoulder rehabilitation exoskeleton would be presented and shown to improve the safety of the overall system.

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A lot of research has been done in robot path generation, including automatic path planning and teaching/playback. Teleoperation is commonly used to control a robot from a remote site in an unknown environment. Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) is developing a Humanoid robot, which has two arms (9 degrees of freedom for each), two hands (4 d.o.f. each), a waist (3 d.o.f.) and a neck (2 d.o.f.) An automatic path planner which takes advantage of redundancy is also developed, however, it requires huge computational power and time. For some tasks, which are very complex, or interacting with environments, the robot path can be generated very easily and accurately by human teaching, hence the automatic path planner is not required. Using sensors, human motion is analyzed and converted to robot joint angles. For tasks interacting with an unknown environment, teleoperation with force feedback is more useful. A simple exoskeleton-type master arm is designed based on kinematic analysis. For force reflection, pneumatic actuators are used. This device is integrated with KIST Humanoid robots. A force reflecting master hand is also developed. In addition to the master arm/hand, visual information is fed back to the human through HMD for higher interaction, and voice command interpreter/voice synthesis is integrated. Therefore a new method of human/robot integration is developed

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Task-oriented repetitive movement can improve movement performance in patients with neurological or orthopaedic lesions. The application of robotics can serve to assist, enhance, evaluate, and document neurological and orthopaedic rehabilitation of movements. ARMin is a new robot for arm therapy applicable to the training of activities of daily living in clinics. ARMin has a semi-exoskeleton structure with six degrees of freedom, and is equipped with position and force sensors. The mechanical structure, the actuators and the sensors of the robot are optimized for patient-cooperative control strategies based on impedance and admittance architecture. This paper describes the new robot, the mechanical structure, the control circuit, the sensors and actuators and some safety aspects.

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Sit-to-stand (STS) movement is a common human task which involves combination of a musculoskeletal structure integrated with neural control. We present a conceptual 3D bipedal nonlinear model for STS task with optimal controller design for exoskeletontorques. This model has 7 sagittal plane angles, 3 frontal plane angles, and 3 foot translational variables with 3 position based holonomic constraints. We regulate the model with optimal controller design by coupled torque optimization due to muscular interaction between ankle, knee and hip joints. Our simulation results show the improvement in the results from previous controller design schemes. We further obtain experimental data for STS task on a force plate to compare the ground reaction forces of experimental data with our mathematical framework. This proves the validity of the model to extend this mathematical framework for further analysis of healthy and neuro-deficient subjects and accordingly designs of ergonomics and rehabilitation robotics.

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