Directional intention identification for running control of an omni-directional walker

Walking is a vital exercise for health promotion and a fundamental ability necessary for everyday life. In the authors' previous studies, an omni-directional walker (ODW) has been developed for walking rehabilitation and walking support. In the case of walking support, it is necessary for the ODW to know which direction its user is intending to go according to the user's manipulation. However, since the directional intention and physical manipulation of a user are not always consistent with each other, it is an important subject to identify the real directional intention from physical manipulation. In this paper, a method is proposed to recognize a user's directional intention according to the pressures, which are measured by sensors embedded in the ODW's armrest, from the user's forearms. Firstly, the relationship between forearm pressure and directional intention was extracted as fuzzy rules. Then an algorithm is proposed for directional intention identification based on Distance-Type Fuzzy Reasoning Method (DTFRM). Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by experiments, which show that reasoning results are consistent with the intended directions.