Basic study on gait rehabilitation system with intelligently controllable walker (i-Walker)

A caster walker is a supporting frame with casters and wheels under its legs. This tool is regularly utilized as a life support tool or a walking rehabilitation tool in hospitals, nursing homes and individual residences. This device easily moves thanks to its wheels and casters. However falling accidents often happen when it moves without users. The falling accident is very serious problem and one of leading causes of secondary injuries and disorders. In the other case, it is hard to move to desired directions if users have imbalance in their motor function or sensory function, e.g., hemiplegic patients. In order to improve safeness and operability of the walkers, we installed MR fluid brakes on left and right wheels of the walker and controlled walking speed and direction. We named this intelligently controllable walker, “i-Walker” and discussed on the control methods and experimental results in this paper. In the first part of this paper, preliminary trial for a direction control is described. In this part of the paper, we suggest a simple control method. This method is improved in the next section. In this section, a walking experiment on a straight way with the new control method is discussed. In the new controller, subjects could smoothly walk with less perturbation than the previous controller.