Control System Viability Analysis on Electrical Stimulation Platform

Abstract

Spinal cord injuries (SCI) can lead to body movement control loss interfering on the ambulant capability in the majority of these cases. Functional electrical stimulation (FES) was developed to soothe the consequences or aid in rehabilitation, evolving the electrical process of stimulating an affected muscle by the SCI, inducing desired movement for different ends. This project is part of a bigger goal, to successfully control lower limbs from paraplegic and hemiplegic patients during rehabilitation sessions with the use of FES-cycling, and the part presented in this paper is the validation of an electrical stimulator platform’s capability to receive closed loop control strategies applications and systems, created based on the STM boards. The validations were based on a PI controller using a range of real mathematical models, from a simple butterworth to a healthy person leg. The results obtained from the collected, treated and compared data from different stages were enough to confirm that the stimulator is capable of receiving a closed loop control system basing most affirmations on the root medium square error methodology between the gathered and reference data vectors. Results showed that all of them were below 5%, indicating a high compatibility with the base data for each of the validations.