Manus is a wheelchair mounted manipulator, meant to assist severely handicapped people in carrying out all day living tasks, such as eating, drinking, scratching etc. The manipulator has six rotational degrees of freedom for positioning and orienting the gripper, one degree of freedom for opening and closing the gripper, and one (optional) degree of freedom for lifting the entire manipulator. M...

This article proposes an autonomous docking control for nonholonomic constrained mobile robots and applies it to intelligent mobility device or wheelchair assisting the user in approaching resting furniture such as a chair bed. We defined virtual landmark inferred from target destination. Then, we solve problem of keeping targeted volume inside field view (FOV) tracking camera through novel def...

The extreme difficulty with which persons with severe disabilities have been taught to maneuver a power wheelchair has been described in case studies, and anecdotal evidence suggests the existence of a patient population for whom mobility is severely limited if not impossible given currently available power wheelchair control interfaces. Since our review of the literature provided little eviden...

The kinematics and dynamics of two industrial cooperating robots are presented in this paper. The NOC (natural orthogonal complement) method is used to derive the dynamical equations for the motion of two cooperating robots. The joint torques of the two robots are determined based on the optimization techniques in order to obtain unique solution for joint torques. To this end, minimizing the cr...

Encouraging an active lifestyle is an essential part of successful rehabilitation programs, and the link between physical activity and quality of life (QOL) is well established among patients with mobility disorders. Biomechanical aspects of wheelchair design play an important role in physical activity and social participation of disabled individuals. This review focuses on key biomechanical fe...

BACKGROUND Many older adults rely on a manual wheelchair for mobility but typically receive little, if any, training on how to use their wheelchair effectively and independently. Standardized skill training is an effective intervention, but limited access to clinician trainers is a substantive barrier. Enhancing Participation in the Community by Improving Wheelchair Skills (EPIC Wheels) is a 1-...

Wheelchair locomotion is an important form of mobility for many individuals with spinal cord injury. However, manual wheelchair propulsion can lead to upper-limb pain and can be very inefficient. This has led investigators to apply biomechanics to the study of wheelchair use. The objectives of this study were (1) to determine the frequency content of the motion of both hands during two speeds o...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the structural anthropometric dimensions of adult wheelchair users as part of a larger project that involved developing a database of the structural characteristics and functional abilities of wheelchair users. Measurements were made on 121 adult manual and powered wheelchair users with an electromechanical probe that registered the three-dimensional lo...

Wheelchair users rely on their wheelchairs for mobility for extended periods of time every day. According to the International Standards Organization 2631-1 standard on human vibration, individuals in a seated position when exposed to whole-body vibrations (WBV) are at risk of injury. This study evaluated vibration exposure during manual and power wheelchair driving over nine sidewalk surfaces ...

Wheelchair mobility performance is an important aspect in most wheelchair court sports, commonly measured with an indoor tracking system or wheelchair bound inertial sensors. Both methods provide key wheelchair mobility performance outcomes regarding speed. In this study, we compared speed profiles of both methods to gain insight into the level of agreement, for recommendations regarding future...