Co-emergence Robot Walk-Mate and Its Support for Elderly People

Abstract

Walk training for elderly people is carried out by using the cooperative walk between human and human. In such care relationship, both walk movements are mutually adapted and walking itself is co-emerged in real-time. However, such co-emergence process has not been realized by the present welfare apparatus, and our group have proposed Walk-Mate which is the walking support robot to realize such process in human-machine relationship. In this research, we applied Walk-Mate to the elderly people who actually have walk handicaps. Then, balance and smoothness of walking were analyzed as an index of the effectiveness of Walk-Mate. As the first phase, it was shown that the system was effective for the modeled disabled person that was constructed by attaching a load to one leg and fixing a knee joint. In the following phase, effectiveness for elderly people who have handicaps of neural and muscle skeletal system was studied, and consequently sufficient effects were shown from the viewpoint of stability of walking.