A Visual Information Based Walking Intention Recognition Method for Intelligent Walking Training Robot

Abstract

For the people who lost the walking ability temporally due to traffic accidents or falling, the timely walking rehabilitation training is necessary significantly. In the former study, an intelligent walking training robot (IWTR) was developed, and its effectiveness was verified by clinical testing for walking rehabilitation, in which the user was instructed to follow a series of designed walking paths. However, as the walking ability recovery, it is demanded more free walking training with the insurance of walking safety. In this study, we proposed a walking intention recognition method based on the visual information of patients’ feet, by which IWTR can recognize the patients’ walking intention for tracking them to provide walking assistance. Therefore, IWTR can keep patients from the falling risk during their spontaneous walking training and the patients can walk on plane field without moving limitation. In the proposed system, the patients’ feet motion was monitored by a camera fixed on the IWTR. Depending on the markers set on patients’feet, the orientation and position of each foot were extracted for walking intention recognition. By assessing the relationship between feet pattern and walking intention, eight rules were derived, and a rule-based waking intention method was proposed. We verified the walking intention recognition accuracy of the proposed method on the IWTR by experiments, and the effectiveness was presented in this paper.