Academic Report: A Wearable Robotic Exoskeleton for Gait Rehabilitation
Speaker：Prof. Yu Haoyong
Time：2017.5.24 10:00-11:00AM
Location：Conference Room, 4th Floor, Hydraulic Old Building, Yuquan Campus
Abstract:
The population aging has resulted in escalating cost in healthcare due to increasing number of patients and the decreasing number of healthcare workers. Robotics technologies offer great potential to reduce cost in healthcare by improving the productivity. Robots can be also be used to improve outcomes of treatment such as physical therapy for stroke patients.
In this talk, I will first give a general introduction of the development of rehabilitation robots for neurorehabilitation as well as assistive robots at Biorobotics Lab at the National University of Singapore, which include exoskeleton robots and smart walker for gait training and smart hospital bed movers for healthcare workers.
I will then present a novel robotic exoskeleton for sub-acute and chronic stroke patients to conduct over-ground gait training at home and outpatient setting. The device is wearable, compact, lightweight and in modular design. It consists of a knee joint and an ankle joint actuated by the same novel series elastic actuator (SEA). The novel SEA design overcomes the limitation of conventional SEA design by using one low-stiffness translational spring at low speed range and one high-stiffness torsion spring at high speed range. This enables the actuator to have a high intrinsic compliance as well as high peak force. During over-ground gait training, it is critical for the robot to synchronize with the human movement and provide the assistance at the right gait phase. We develop a novel control system to synchronize the robot motion with the human motion. Gait events are first detected in real time with a hidden Markov model (HMM). An adaptive oscillator is utilized to estimate the stride percentage of human gait based on the gait event information. Assistive torque is provided to the human joint via an impedance controller according to the synchronous reference gait trajectory and the actual human joint movement. Preliminary clinical trials with stroke patients also prove that the system can improve the gait patterns of the patients. More comprehensive clinical trials with randomized control study will be conducted before commercialization of the device.
Brief Bio:
Dr. Yu received his Bachelor’s Degree and Master’s Degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1988 and 1991 respectively. He obtained his PhD from Massachusetts institute of Technology in 2002. He was the Principal Member of Technical Staff in DSO National Laboratories of Singapore. Dr. Yu is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Biomedical Engineering of NUS. He is also a Principal Investigator of the Singapore Institute of Neurotechnology (SiNAPSE) and the Advanced Robotic Center of NUS (ARC) of NUS. His current research focuses on rehabilitation and assistive robotics.
http://www.bioeng.nus.edu.sg/biorob/