P-29

Introduction

Moving from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ exoskeletons in rehabilitation the traditional robotics paradigms for sensing and actuation in the exoskeleton joints do not hold anymore due to the extreme loss of stiffness in limbs and joints of the exoskeleton components.

In fact assessment of kinematics and kinetics in soft exoskeletons resembles more a traditional 3D analysis of movement paradigm using independent IMUs. As a consequence, now one has to deal with e.g. soft tissue artifacts and observability issues of the IMUs natural references gravity and earth magnetic field [1].

Solutions are limited by physical limitations and capabilities of the system hardware and communication channels.

Methods

A monitor, feedback and control system for all kinematics, kinetics and exoskeleton control data is developed that facilitates a self organizing distributed data pipeline (TCP/IP) using the same OS/SDE (Windows10, LabView 2015). This facilitates module development and testing on one central system and subsequent easy deployment on different devices at different locations. Data is stored in a central data base facility. Functional modules are developed for:

-communication with several hardware platforms (Xsens MTw2 IMU sensors, XoSoft control system, additional exoskeleton sensing and feedback hardware, patient interaction).

-for body segment and joint kinematics [2], kinetics estimation and data segmentation

-for parameters estimation and summaries plus event detection for feedback to several types of users.

Modules for adaptive activity recognition of activities [3] and intention detection are developed to facilitate context based interpretation of recorded data and also provide patient behavior context to the control system,

Discussion

So far it appears that the flexibility of the module localization is serving the changing and flexible nature of the XoSoft concept, while the chosen OS appears on more and more hardware platforms.

Acknowledgements

Horizon 2020 program project XoSoft (688175).