Standing Assistance with Non-Verbal Cues Based on Intended Movement

This paper proposes a novel standing assistance scheme that guides a subject to adopt a suitable posture using intended movements. In much previous research, an assistive robot requires the patient to understand the standing reference beforehand and generally, the subject learns the standing motion used by the robot. However, for practical use, a patient should be able to use an assistive robot without special prior knowledge. Nursing specialists also guide their patients with an intended movement. For example, when they incline a patient's upper body before lifting it up, they guide the patient's body with a special moving pattern. Moving in this way is based on their experience and expertise and, in fact, the patient moves according to the motion intended by the nursing specialist. In this paper, we investigate what type of motion guides a patient, and we develop a standing assistance scheme that guides the patient to stand in the intended way. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments with our prototype.