A Synergetic Voluntary Control for Exoskeleton based on Spinal Cord Mapping of Peripheral Bioelectric Activity
Shotaro Ishikawa, Hideki Kadone, Kenji Suzuki
Abstract
Walking rehabilitation must be performed based on voluntary motion intention, and for this purpose, the development of a control method for an exoskeleton robot based on voluntary intention is investigated. This study proposes a method of exoskeleton robot control to estimate the voluntary lower limb muscle activities lost after a spinal cord injury (SCI). This method is based on the spinal cord mapping of the remaining muscle activities and its matching to the one obtained from healthy participants considering the muscle synergy of the whole body during the walking motion. By implementing the matching procedure at the spinal cord map level and incorporating information of reliable and unreliable spinal cord levels based on a diagnosis, the method has the potential to provide a maximally voluntary locomotion for people with SCI. We report an analysis of the synergy of the whole-body muscle activity during walking and its spinal cord mapping using non-negative matrix factorization and the computation of the transformation matrix to estimate the intended lower limb muscle activity from the remaining spinal cord activity. The implementation of the proposed method using the right leg of the hybrid assistive limb and walking experiments with a healthy participant are also reported.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2018_asynergeticvolun,
title = {A Synergetic Voluntary Control for Exoskeleton based on Spinal Cord Mapping of Peripheral Bioelectric Activity},
author = {Shotaro Ishikawa and Hideki Kadone and Kenji Suzuki},
booktitle = {IROS 2018},
year = {2018}
}