ASBGo – Multimodal Smart Walker for rehabilitation assistance and clinical evaluation

This article presents a brief summary of the team work in the development of the ASBGo Smart Walker with the intent of helping patients with high disorders of balance, such as cerebellar ataxic patients. It also describes the first steps towards the proposal of a new treatment with the ASBGo with real, ataxic patients. It describes the walker and associated sensory systems; the implementation of four operating modes (autonomous, manual, safety and remote control) in the ASBGo and application of the developed gait and posture assessment tool into the rehabilitation of patients with ataxia. I. MOTIVATION AND SCOPE Locomotion is an important human faculty that affects an individual's life, bringing implications not only in social and personal development but also in the aspect of employment. Thus, it becomes necessary to find means and tools to improve or help to restore and increase the mobility of the affected people, so they can recover their independence. For that purpose walkers were designed to improve pathological gait, through the provision of a support base for the upper limbs that improves the balance of the individual and reduces the load on the lower limbs. However, a large number of walker owners experience problems related to use of a walker or to its design, and the number of accidents is increasing at a faster rate than the number of users. Therefore, smart walkers (SW) appeared to provide for a more stable gait and easy maneuverability, and became a clinical tool for gait evaluation, thus bringing more quality for the rehabilitation of its users and work of the physiotherapists. II. OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH This article describes a new smart walker, ASBGo (Assistance and monitoring System Aid) that improves the stability of assisted gait of people with physical disabilities. Thus, four sensory subsystems were developed: (i) four operation modes that can be selected according with the rehabilitation purpose; (ii) a system that captures the relatives evolutions between the lower limbs of the user and the walker as well as the trunk, given us information related to gait pattern and stability for further clinical evaluation. A smart walker is intended to be a device that can act as a versatile rehabilitation functional compensation. It should be adaptive considering the necessities of its user and its use should be safe. Patients present different necessities according to their intrinsic characteristics, their diseases and *This work has been supported by the FCT Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia grant: SFRH/BD/76097/2011) and in the scope of the project: Pest-UID/CEC/00319/2013. Maria Martins and Cristina P. Santos are with ALGORITMI Research Centre, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal (corresponding author to provide phone: +351-253-510-190; fax: +351-253-510-189; e-mail: cristina @dei.uminho.pt). therapies. In order to help them, a smart walker should provide for different functionalities that adapt to user the needs. This project includes the implementation of four different operating modes (autonomous, manual, safety and remote control modes) that allow the physiotherapist to choose the most appropriate one for the type of difficulty of the patient. In addition, the design of the presented walker was planned for specifically help prescribed walker patients for gait therapy. Besides these functionalities, the developed smart walker, ASBGo, will be turned into a measurement tool for evaluating the walker's user gait. The smart walker is integrated with sensory systems (active depth camera and accelerometer) that enable to evaluate, in real-time, the progress of the patient in terms of spatiotemporal and postural stability parameters. This information is then analyzed to follow the evolution of the patient and helps on deciding when the patient should leave the smart walker, to go to next stage of treatment. Since the potential of using walking aids is promising and studies focusing on its use were not found, this project also includes the proposal of a new treatment with ASBGo, developed with the intent of helping patients with high disorders of balance, such as cerebellar ataxic patients (full description in [1]). Thus, this article will be divided into three main goals: description of the ASBGo and associated sensory systems; implementation of four operating modes (autonomous, manual, safety and remote control) in the ASBGo and application of the developed gait and posture assessment tool into the rehabilitation of patients with ataxia.