Development of a Standing Assistance Walker for a Patient with Low Level of Care

This paper proposes a novel low cost robotic walker with standing assistance function. Our system focuses on domestic use for elderly people who is low level of care and need nursing in their day-to-day lives. Usually, these patients require a partial standing assistance only when they need it, not a full assistance during standing motion such as a hanging by the lift. The widely and easily use of such assistance in daily life will be successful in ensuring safety and providing an inexpensive manufacturing cost. These two opposed requirements have been realized with our developed robotic walker. Our key ideas are two topics. First is proposal of a mechanical design with minimum and smaller actuators. Proposed system uses a gas spring which helps the up/down actuator and our system assists the patient with wheel actuators on a powered walker for stabilizing its user as well as for lifting up the user. Second is assistance procedure which leads the patient to suitable posture by the force guidance and voice instruction. We investigate what factor enables the patient to stand up safety by preliminary experiment. The performance of our proposed system is verified through experiments using our prototype with elderly and handicapped subjects.