Abstract
At welfare facilities, a therapist and elderly person are able to realize a suitable walk support relation through a cooperative walk. We have called the mutual adaptation process on walk support "Co-emergence process", and have preceded the walk support machine based on this process. In this paper, we analyzed the Co-emergence process of the cooperative walk between humans as a model. As a result, we found two kinds of characteristic control processes for it. One is the process to control the leg's motions, which relate the rhythm generation mechanisms on the spinal nerves. It was clarified that this process realizes the entrainment between the footstep rhythms of the subjects. The other is the control process of the footsteps' coherence between the subjects, which relate the mutual relation between the motion of arm and leg. Additionally it became clear that the process is connected with the attention mechanism of the high level function of the brain and synchronize their timing between the subjects on 10 to 30 second time scales. Thus these results suggest that the Co-emergence processes of the cooperative walks are realized by the two kinds of control processes that are based on the existence of the attention, and realize the Co-emergence of the suitable cooperative walk.
