Human Motion Assistance using Walking-aid Robot and Wearable Sensors

An omni-directional walking-aid robot is developed for the elderly in this study. A motion control strategy of walking-aid robot based on observing human status by wearable sensors is proposed. During normal walking, the robot is controlled by a conventional admittance control scheme. When the tendency of a fall is detected, the robot will immediately react to prevent the user from falling down. The distance between the human Centre of Pressure (COP) and the midpoint of two human feet is assumed to be a significant feature to detecting the fall events. Dubois possibility theory is applied to describe the membership function of ‘normal walking’ state. A threshold based fall detection approach is obtained from online evaluation of the walking status. Finally, experiments demonstrate the validity of the proposed strategy.