Wednesday, April 2, 2014, 10AM in 33-218
Guarav Mukherjee, University of Cincinnati
Design and development of an assistive exoskeleton for independent sit-stand transitions among the elderly
3 million senior citisens above the age of 65 in a population that numbers at approximately 50 million today are under supervision, either at their own houses or at retirement homes. These people require assistance with at least one of more Activity of Daily Living (ADL) in everyday life. The act of transferring is an important contributor to this measure of in-situ independence in mobility. Transferring in and out of chairs, toilets, and beds requires the ability to perform sin-stand transitions, and thus the ability to perform this task independently assumes importance. Given the high annual cost for individual nursing supervision, technology needs to be developed to make the elderly independent. This work addresses the development of a passive assistive knee exoskeleton device and a design for a controllerr for an actualyed system that supplement;’s the user’s effort towards task completion. A method and initial ersults are also presented from an analysis of surface electromyographic (EMG) data to demonstrate consistent activation patterns in the execution of the sit-stand task.