Design of a network-based mobile gait rehabilitation system

In this paper, a network-based mobile gait rehabilitation system is proposed for improved mobility and tele-rehabilitation. In this system, an Internet-based body sensor network is employed for health monitoring and a local highspeed wireless network is developed to achieve precise control of the gait rehabilitation device, which is a compact rotary elastic actuator (cRSEA). A new wireless protocol called MBStarPlus is proposed to achieve a high sampling rate and real-time communication. To deal with packet loss in the wireless network, a modified linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controller is combined with a disturbance observer (DOB) to control the cRSEA over the wireless network. Successful system integration and promising experimental results validate both the system design and proposed control algorithm. The plan for clinical testing with the proposed system is discussed.