Abstract
Medical lower-limb exoskeleton (LLE) has been developed for rehabilitation and walking assistance. However, it lacked feedback on current status to the wearer. The patients with perception lost in lower-extremity (for example, elderly people and paraplegia patients) cannot perceive their lower extremities. Therefore, haptic feedback might be necessary for them if they wear a LLE, which might inform them of current gait state. A prospective study was conducted in this paper with a purpose of designing a vibration device for a lower-extremity exoskeleton system to feed back the current walking state of the exoskeleton to wearers. Firstly, the basic tests were conducted to collect the accuracy and reaction time of subjects based on two vibration modes (strength change and position change vibration mode). Then, the subjects wore an exoskeleton with the two vibration devices to complete walking tasks and the task completion time was recorded. The accuracy of the two vibration devices can both reach about 90%, and there was no significant difference in the reaction time. It indicated that the feedback of the two devices can be well perceived by most subjects. The results of the subjective questionnaires showed that subjects prefer the strength change mode. Although there was no significant of completion time in no-feedback and vibration-feedback modes, the questionnaires showed that exoskeleton with haptic feedback can inform the wearers current state of exoskeleton and made the subjects feel safer. In the future design, LLE with vibration devices can be considered for rehabilitation and walking assistance for the elder people and the patients with motor dysfunction in lower limbs.
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Acknowledgements
This research project is supported by the Open Funding Project of National Key Laboratory of Human Factors Engineering (6142222190308), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (ZYGX2019Z010), and the Key research and development project of Sichuan science and technology plan (2018FZ0053).
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Wang, Y., Qiu, J., Cheng, H., Wang, L. (2021). A Prospective Study of Haptic Feedback Method on a Lower-Extremity Exoskeleton. In: Gao, Q., Zhou, J. (eds) Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Technology Design and Acceptance. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12786. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78108-8_19
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