Design and clinical assessment of a rollator with assistive brake control for the severely disabled

• Main Authors: Han-Hsin Yang, 楊涵馨
• Other Authors: Liang-Wey Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/15390339300801808474

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 醫學工程學研究所 === 92 === For the severely disabled patients, support and stability of standard walker is not enough. If these patients can’t get a special walker which supplies more support, stability, and safety, it will reduce the chance for them to walk. We aim to design a new rollator for the severely disabled providing more support, stability, safety, and maintaining adequate gait. We design a damping system and an electromagnetic automatical brake system on the rear wheel, and the sensor in it can detect the speed. This rear wheel system is designed to control the walking speed and prevent the falling for these severely disabled. We have two hypotheses. First, it has better performance when user walking with this new rollator. Second, walking with this new rollator can decrease user’s energy consumption. After the new rollator is manufactured, we will take clinical experiments to demonstrate. We design the structure of the new rollator, and assisted with the mathematical model. In clinical experiments, we invited CP patients, CVA patients, and SCI patients to participate in this study. We use Vicon Motion Analysis system to record the motion of the subjects. Data of motion we observe are including step length, stride length, double support time, speed, cadence, upright position of trunk, hip joint motion, and knee joint motion. We also measured the oxygen consumption in the first part of the experiments, to observe the energy cost of users. Results show the new rollator gives CP patients lots of assistance. It can improve the gait parameters of walking and joints’ range of motion in CP cases. And better walking posture for all subjects. From data of oxygen consumption, it shows that walking with the new rollator would cost less energy for patient who has balance problem. The subject with worse balance problem has the better energy saving performance of walking with the new rollator. Our new rollator is suitable for patients with balance and speed control problems. The effects of the new rollator can easily be observed from step length, speed, hip joint motion, and oxygen consumption.