A rehabilitation walker with standing and walking assistance

Abstract

This paper proposes a robotic walker system with standing and walking assistance function. Our system focuses on domestic use for aged person who needs nursing in their daily life. Our key ideas are two topics. The first topic is combination of standing assistance function and walking assistance function. In previous works, many assistance devices are specialized in only “standing-up operation” or “walking operation”. However, in their daily life, elderly person needs standing, walking and seating assistance continuously by a same device. Our developing assistance system can support both operations by a small sized mechanism with low cost for domestic use. The second topic is steady standing assistance operation using an assistance manipulator and an active walker. In order to use the remaining physical strength of the patient, it is required to maintain the patient’s body posture which enables him to use own strength easily. According to the patient’s posture during standing up, our proposed system selects more appropriate device and controller, and realizes the standing assistance with steady posture of the patient based on the nursing specialists. The performance of our proposed system is verified by experiments using our prototype.