Wearable Robotic Walker for Gait Rehabilitation and Assistance in Patients with Cerebral Palsy

Abstract

Cerebral Palsy (CP) is the most common cause of permanent serious physical disability in childhood. New strategies are needed to help promote, maintain, and rehabilitate the functional capacity of children with severe level of impairment. The main objective of this work is to present a Human-Robot interaction strategy for overground rehabilitation to support novel robotic-based therapies for CP rehabilitation. This strategy is implemented in a new Wearable Robotic Walker named CPWalker. In our approach, legs’ kinematics information obtained from a Laser Range Finder (LRF) sensor is used to detect the user’s locomotion intentions and drive the robotic platform. During a preliminary validation we observed that this approach enabled the robot to continuously follow the human velocity and provided body weight support during gait.