2018 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Development of the Body Weight Support system using Pneumatic Artificial Actuators
| Project/Area Number |
18K18423
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| Research Institution | Shibaura Institute of Technology |
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Principal Investigator |
Tran Van・Thuc 芝浦工業大学, 工学(系)研究科(研究院), 研究員 (70817410)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2018-04-01 – 2020-03-31
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| Keywords | Body Weight Support / Rehabilitation / Gait / Walking / Training / Spinal Cord Injury / Orthosis / Counterweight system |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The novel active BWS system using pneumatic muscle actuators for rehabilitation system for gait training was successfully designed and produced. The new BWS system provided a totally new way to implement the unloading for the rehabilitation of patient on the treadmill. For validating and assessment, experiments were implemented and compared two different systems, counterweight system and the active BWS system. The main difference between the active BWS system is that the way that the unloading force is generated.The results showed that the new system well reproduced the behavior of a normal walk and has much advantage than the counterweight system.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
We successfully designed, manufactured, and set up the Body Weight Support System using the Pneumatic Muscle Actuators.
The controlling strategy for the new Body Weight Support system has been developed.
Several experiments were also implemented to evaluate the new Body Weight Support system.
Basing on the primary results we aimed to develop and implement the system that will be more reliable and efficiency in the real clinical situation.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
For near future work, my aim is to investigate the adaptation of the active BWS system to the abnormal gait. I hypothesis that the active BWS system could adapt better than the Counter Weight system.
My plan has two phases: for first 6 months, phase one is implement some experiment to compare the current BWS system and Counter Weight system with abnormal gait, phase two is to develop the strategy that provide proper unloading force in BWS system to improve the gait parameters and support subject during abnormal walking.
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| Causes of Carryover |
For the next step of current research, I would need to prepare so facilities for development the control strategy of the new Body Weight Support system.
I may need to buy a advance control tool kit of National Instrument for LabVIEW software for control designing.
The rest would be used for more experiments conduction and paper preparing.
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Research Products
(4 results)
