Adjustment of instantaneous reference walking speed during synchronized robot-based gait rehabilitation

Abstract

This paper presents a method to adjust the instantaneous reference speed of the mobile platform or treadmill of robotic gait rehabilitation systems during compliant, synchronized therapy. This method is particularly useful when the robot-patient synchronization algorithms generate compensations that fluctuate significantly throughout the gait cycle, making it unsuitable to apply these compensations directly to the reference speed values. The method was tested with a synchronization algorithm that generates continues temporal-compensations based on a phase controller. The tests comprised simulation of different scenarios and a practical test with a healthy subject using an over-ground gait rehabilitation system.

Keywords

• gait rehabilitation
• human-robot interaction
• synchronization