Development of an active walker for disabled children

An active walker which can be used by children with walking disabilities is proposed in this paper. The walker is propelled based on the gait intention of the user which is found from user's waist position with respect to the walker. The forward and rotational motion of the walker is decided from the user's gait intention. The hardware implementation of the active walker as well as experimental results are presented in this paper. The experimental result shows that the active walker is capable of moving along with the user over various walking surfaces, and thus reduces the effort of user to move it.