ASBGo: A Smart Walker for Ataxic Gait and Posture Assessment, Monitoring, and Rehabilitation

摘要

Cerebellar ataxia is a neurological disturbance that affects the person’s mobility, motor coordination, postural control, and spatiotemporal awareness. There is neither a pharmacological nor a surgical solution that can restore completely the neurological damages and reverse motor impairments. Rehabilitation therapies are demonstrating promising results in enhancing the persons’ residual motor skills. However, they involve high-skilled professionals, and their effectiveness relies on the clinicians’ experience. Furthermore, current rehabilitation scenarios entail a high burden of care to clinicians and the patient’s assessment is based on subjective metrics. Thus, it becomes paramount to find complementary means of rehabilitation that promote motor skills recovery, reduce the heavy burden of manual therapy, and provide repetitive and intensity-adapted rehabilitation scenarios, mitigating the social-economic impacts. In this context, this chapter presents the current paradigm of smart walkers as multifunctional assistive devices. Their functionalities, benefits, and limitations are discussed, presenting the status. Furthermore, the ASBGo Smart Walker is presented as a rehabilitation tool that fosters human–robot cooperation and personalized assistance by following a user-oriented design. The system overview, main functionalities, and clinical relevance are presented and discussed. Finally, conclusions and future work are presented.