Force Sensitive Resistor Based Design and Modeling of Smart Walking Assistance Device by Axial Direction Control for Osteoarthritis

Abstract

Walking is a very important activity in human life which reduces many problems related to blood pressure regulation and heart diseases, but osteoarthritis patients suffer from mobility deficiency. The smart walking assistance (SWA) device was developed for mobility assistance. It is necessary to identify the intended direction of the user by the SWA device. While walking in the intended direction, human body reflects certain forearm movement, which can be recognized in terms of force. In this work, a method was proposed to identify the direction for the movement according to the forces exerted by the user’s forearms, which are acknowledged by the force-sensitive resistor (FSR) placed on the walker’s armrest. Depending on the FSR outputs in the range of 0–1023 scaled by Arduino, an algorithm was implemented for the direction control of the walker-based threshold. The user intended direction was validated by the experiment and monitored using MATLAB.