Development of Walking Assistance Devices Considering the Users’ Psychological and Physical Status

We have developed certain walking assistance devices addressed to various patients and elderly and healthy people. The purpose of these devises is to achieve effective rehabilitation results, while at the same time shortening its duration and promoting exercise to improve the users’ health status. As a design concept for assistive devices, the perspective of a Universal design is to create a device that can be used by as many people as possible. However, since the appropriate assisting force and parts differ depending on the target user and the target’s movement, it is important to design hardware that is suitable for each user’s condition according to an Inclusive design. Although most conventional devices provide physical assistance, the key is to improve and maintain the user’s motivation, and thus we believe that it is critical to provide appropriate assistance while at the same time considering the users’ psychological and physical status. In this paper, we introduce several devices developed in our laboratory for various users and present the automatically tuned assistance system, a system that functions according to the user’s emotions and fatigue.