In general, treatment of full or partial loss of function in the upper limb due to injury relies on extremely labour intensive physiotherapy procedures. Although mechanical assistive device exist for limbs this is rare for the upper body. In this paper we present a seven degree of motion prototype upper arm training/physiotherapy (exoskeleton) system. The total weight of the uncompensated orthosis is less than 2kg. This low mass is primarily due to the use of a new range of pneumatic Muscle Actuators (pMA) as power source for the system. This type of actuator, which has also an excellent power/weight ratio, meets the need for safety, simplicity and lightness. The work presented focuses on the physiotherapy and training control architecture used to make the system a multi-functionality facility which permits the execution of physiotherapy and training regimes under isokinetic, isotonic and training mode operation.

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• When compared with humans, robots have superior strength and endurance, and vastly inferior intelligence.
• A powered exoskeleton (PEX) is a robotic device that is attached to a person’s body and is controlled by them.
• PEX fall into two categories:
– User interface devices for tele-robotics and virtual reality applications
– Devices to amplify the user’s force output.
• Our work belongs to the second category

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Since the 1990’s, mobile computing has transformed its penetration from niche markets and early prototypes to ubiquity. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) evolved from GRiD’s PalmPad and Apple’s Newton in 1993 to the Palm, Handspring, and Microsoft-based models that support the multi-billion dollar industry today. While BellSouth/IBM’s Simon may have been the only mobile phone to offer e-mail connectivity in 1994, almost every modern mobile phone provides data services today. Portable digital music players have replaced cassette and CD-based systems, and these “MP3 players” are evolving into portable repositories for music videos, movies, photos, and personal information such as e-mail. Laptops, which were massive and inconvenient briefcase devices in the late 1980’s, now outsell desktops. Yet all these devices still have a common, difficult problem to overcome: power. This chapter will review trends in mobile computing over the past decade and describe how batteries affect design tradeoffs for mobile device manufacturers. This analysis leads to an interesting question: is there an alternative to batteries? Although the answer has many components that range from power management through energy storage, the bulk of this chapter will overview the history and state-of-the-art in harvesting power from the user to support body-worn mobile electronics.

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In this paper we present a method to calibrate the surface EMG signal-to-force-relationship online. For this, a simple biomechanical model composed of bones and muscles is used. The calibration is based on an online optimization algorithm where the error between the movement of the human and the movement computed with the biomechanical model is minimized. The proposed method will be part of a control system for an exoskeleton robot that should aid the wearer in everyday-life situations like walking, standing up and sitting down. In contrast to existing methods for the calculation of the EMG signal-to-force-relationship, we are not interested in the exact force values of every single muscle, but our model groups some muscles together and uses the EMG signal of one of those muscles as a representative for the group to simplify calculations. The performance of the presented method was investigated on the leg movement in sagittal plane without contact to the environment.

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In this paper, demographic change and ageing societies are identified as potential drivers for the development and implementation of pervasive technologies in our environment. Computers and Microsystems have become smaller and cheaper and become a part of our life and society. Wearable Robots, advanced prosthetics and sensor implants even aim at making human beings part of those developing cyber environments. We think that strategically guided and joint research has to be done and therefore give an overview of the subject and show that advanced BIM and structured environments play a role as core technology in efficiently deploying and managing pervasive computing and assistive environments on city scale.

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