Mobility aid

Mobility aid

A mobility aid is a physical device designed to improve an individual's ability to move from one place to another, particularly for those who are handicapped. Examples of mobility aids include wheelchairs, scooters, and other assistive devices that support movement transitions and walking.From: Handbook of Human Factors in Litigation [2019], Towards physical interaction-based sequential mobility assistance using latent generative model of movement state [2021], Biomaterials, Medical Devices, and Combination Products [2019]

Assistive technology

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Published in Alex Mihailidis, Roger Smith, Rehabilitation Engineering, 2023

L. Alvarez, A. Cook, J. Polgar

Other devices that support mobility include safe transportation mobility aids (e.g., child car seats, docking systems that secure the wheelchair to the vehicle), vehicle modifications (e.g., left-foot accelerator) and orientation aids for people with low vision (e.g., long canes with which the user detects obstacles in the forward path of travel).

Towards physical interaction-based sequential mobility assistance using latent generative model of movement state

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Published in Advanced Robotics, 2021

Shunki Itadera, Taisuke Kobayashi, Jun Nakanishi, Tadayoshi Aoyama, Yasuhisa Hasegawa

In this paper, we have introduced our development of assistive mobility aid for supporting user's movement in their daily life such as movement transition and walking. First, we proposed an unsupervised learning model based online estimator of the user's state using an LSTM based VAE in order to recognize user's movement state in a lower-dimensional latent space. Then, we presented an impedance control-based assistive strategy on a mobile assistive robot in order to provide a user with an appropriate amount of physical support according to the current user's movement and transition state. Finally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in the online classification of user's movement states and experimental results in providing assistive mobility aid using Toyota Human Support Robot including novel movement detection.

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Assistive technology

Towards physical interaction-based sequential mobility assistance using latent generative model of movement state