15 accepted papers
Neuro-muscular injuries affecting the peroneal nerve or ankle joint dorsiflexor muscles can lead to foot-drop (FD), characterized by a difficulty in dorsiflexing the ankle during the gait. This paper introduces mid- and low-level control strategies for providing an adaptive torque assistance at the
Supernumerary robotic limbs (SRL) offer substantial potential in both the rehabilitation of hemiplegic patients and the enhancement of functional capabilities for healthy individuals. Designing a general-purpose SRL device is inherently challenging, particularly when developing a unified theoretical…
This paper introduces a novel funnel-based adaptive {{\mathcal{L}}_1}{{\mathcal{L}}_1} fuzzy control strategy for assisting ankle joint movement during walking with the use of an actuated ankle foot orthosis (AAFO). A projection-based adaptation mechanism employing a fuzzy system is used to estimate…
Foot-drop (FD) is a post-stroke gait disorder characterized by impaired foot lifting during the swing phase. This paper focuses on providing a continuous ankle joint assistance throughout the gait cycle using an actuated ankle foot orthosis (AAFO). The control strategy is based on an adaptive active
Human gait patterns have been intensively studied, both from medical and engineering perspectives, to understand and compensate pathologies. However, the muscle-force sharing problem is still debated as acquiring individual muscle force measurements is challenging, requiring the use of invasive devi
This study aims at developing a new affordable motion capture system for human upper limbs' joint kinematics estimation based on a reduced set of visual inertial measurement units coupled with a markerless skeleton tracking algorithm. The markerless skeleton tracking algorithm allows to alleviate th…
To control an actuated ankle–foot orthosis (AAFO) during walking, a selectively adaptive hybrid fuzzy control employing particle-swarm optimization was used in conjunction with a Lyapunov-theory-based adaptive fuzzy-logic control. Adaptation (a computationally expensive process) was performed only w
The dynamic load attached to the load gravity imposes an excessive burden to human shoulders during load carriage, resulting in possible muscle injuries and additional physical exertion. This paper proposes an active suspension backpack, capable of transferring partial load from human shoulders to p…
As a life-threatening disease, stroke can lead to long-term problems affecting the patients’ daily living ability. A common problem facing post-stroke patients is foot drop. An emerging modality of interest for correcting the foot drop is to combine both actuated ankle-foot orthosis (AAFO) and funct…
Analysis of human daily living activities, particularly walking activity, is essential for health-care applications such as fall prevention, physical rehabilitation exercises, and gait monitoring. Studying the evolution of the gait cycle using wearable sensors is beneficial for the detection of any…
This paper presents an adaptive knee-joint based Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES)method to correct the foot drop of paretic patients during swing phase. The rationale behind the adaptive FES is to amplify dorsiflexor stimulation in the late swing when it is most needed in order to face the in…
This paper describes a cooperative control approach that combines the use of a powered knee joint orthosis along with Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) for knee joint flexion-extension movement restoration. A closed-loop adaptive control and an open-loop FES of the quadriceps muscle group are…
This paper presents a practical method to identify body segments inertial parameters of a human-exoskeleton system using affordable and easy-to-use sensors. First, the joints and the base kinematics are estimated based on the use of an extended Kalman filter and QR visual markers. Then, joints kinem…
As an important movement of the daily living activities, sit-to-stand (STS) movement is usually a difficult task facing elderly and dependent people. To provide appropriate power assistance for the sit-to-stand movement, a novel intention-based Active Impedance Control (AIC) strategy applied on a lo
This paper deals with the control of a lower limb exoskeleton acting at the knee joint level. Classical −1 adaptive control law is proposed to ensure assistance-as-needed and resistive rehabilitation following a desired trajectory that is defined by a therapeutic doctor. This control law introduces