Descrição
In an aging society it is extremely important to
develop devices, which can support and aid the elderly in their
daily life. This demands tools that extend independent living and
promote improved health. In this work it is proposed a new
interface approach integrated into a walker. This interface is
based on a joystick and it is intended to extract the user’s
movement intentions. The interface is designed to be userfriendly,
simple and intuitive, efficient and economic, meeting
usability aspects and focused on a commercial implementation,
but not being demanding at the user cognitive level. Preliminary
sets of experiments were performed which showed the sensibility
of the joystick to extract navigation commands from the user.
These signals presented a higher frequency component that was
attenuated by a Benedict-Bordner g-h filter. The presented
methodology offers an effective cancelation of the undesired
components from joystick data, allowing the system to extract in
real-time voluntary user’s navigation commands. Based on this
real-time identification of voluntary user’s commands, an
approach to the control architecture of the robotic walker is
being developed, in order to obtain stable and safe user assisted
locomotion.
; Frizera Neto, Anselmo 
