A novel human-machine interface for guiding: The NeoASAS smart walker

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 force sensor and it is intended to extract the user's movement intentions. The interface is designed to be user-friendly, 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 force sensor 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 force sensor 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.