Abstract
An innovative training machine has been developed to improve or maintain elderly people's body strength. Resistance force to be loaded on user's body is generated by an electric motor and dynamically controlled during the exercise based on the level of user's muscle activity. One feature of this training machine is a function to automatically limit the maximum muscle activity to a prespecified level during the exercise. It is expected that this feature is very effective to increase safety of elderly training. The other feature is a function to dynamically control resistance force so that the level of user's muscle activity follows a prespecified curve from the beginning to the end of each cycle of the exercise. This feature provides more efficient and effective muscle strengthening to users compared with conventional training machine. The detail and experimental results are reported in this paper.
