ASBGo: A smart walker for mobility assistance and monitoring system aid

Locomotion is an important human faculty that affects an individual’s life, bringing implications not only in social and personal development but also in the aspect of employment. Thus, it becomes necessary to find means and tools to improve or help to restore and increase the mobility of the affected people, so they can recover their independence. For several years, researchers have been addressing the needs of persons with mobility disabilities through alternative, e.g. wheelchairs, or augmentative devices, e.g. canes, and walkers. Among augmentative devices, walkers play an important role, due to the large number of potential users, its simplicity and ambulatory potential. They were designed to improve pathological gait, through a support base for the upper limbs that improves the balance of the individuals and reduces the load on their lower limbs. Over the past years, technological advances allowed the incorporation of sensors and actuators in conventional walkers. A new class of devices, the smart walkers, emerged to provide a better stability, without affecting the resultant naturalness of the users’ gait patterns. In this context, this thesis aims to develop a smart walker (SmartW) for mobility assistance in hospitals and clinics for people with balance problems. This work is structured in five stages as follows. A complete survey regarding the current state-of-art of walker-based studies is presented. The advances in the walkers’ and SmartWs’ have been enormous and have shown a great potential. Thus, it is presented a review of the available literature of walkers and SmartW and it is discussed major advances that have been made and limitations to be overcome. Then, it is presented the design specifications of the proposed SmartW based in an “enduser” approach, i.e. concerns and needs of end-users are the main focus for these specifications. Functionalities is the next stage where different information gathered by several builtin sensors is used to characterize the assisted human gait and the interaction user-walker. Thus, three sensory systems are developed: (i) a system that captures the relatives evolutions between the lower limbs of the user and the walker as well as the trunk, giving information related to gait pattern and stability for further clinical evaluation; (ii) an intuitive interface for direct acquisition of navigation commands; and (iii) sensory systems to ensure the user safety