Directional control of an omnidirectional walker for walking support with forearm pressures

Walking is a fundamental human ability necessary for everyday life. We have developed an omnidirectional walker (ODW) for walking support to those who have walking disabilities. It is necessary for the ODW to know which direction the user is intending to go during walking support. A novel interface is proposed for the ODW to recognize directional intention according to the user´s forearm pressures which are measured by force sensors embedded in the armrest. The relationship between forearm pressures and directional intention was extracted as fuzzy rules and an algorithm is proposed for directional intention identification based on distance type fuzzy reasoning method. In this paper, we conduct walking support experiments with the proposed method. The results show that the algorithm is applicable to directional control in walking support.