CAREER: Active Orthotics for Helping the Neuromuscularly Impaired to Walk

Franklin W. Olin College Of Engineering, Needham MA

Investigators

Abstract

Many neuromuscularly impaired and/or elderly individuals find it too difficult or too frightening to walk. Often these individuals can walk in controlled environments, but lack the strength to recover from large force disturbances encountered in the real world. Such individuals might be helped if a lightweight, active, leg orthosis occasionally acted to compensate large forces and stabilize gait when a fall is immanent. There are three technical and two scientific challenges that must be addressed to make such a device possible. Technically, the system must be very lightweight, have no need for external (e.g. e.m.g.) sensors, and have a battery that lasts at least an entire day. Scientifically, the system must act with appropriate mechanical behavior and be able to estimate the user's ground-relative limb configuration and motive intent based on a minimum of sensory information. All five of these issues will be addressed in this study. On the Educational frontier, the subject of computer architecture is one of the most rapidly evolving in the field of electrical engineering and computer science. In order to teach computer architecture to undergraduates, we must give them a laboratory substrate that is both motivating (in that students can build circuits that solve interesting problems in real time) and not prohibitively difficult to use. The educational portion of this grant will be used to complete work on a scalable FPGA lab substrate for computer architecture education. It will also be used to aid an ongoing effort to restructure MIT's common core curriculum in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science into a more coherent whole.