REU: Preventing Back Injuries in Nurses and other Health Care Personnel

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The problem of injuries to nurses and other health care workers that are caused by lifting is a very serious and longstanding one. The objective of this research is to determine the fundamentals for the design and control of assistive devices that are either worn or directly operated by health care personnel for the purpose of augmenting human physical strength with the device's mechanical strength, while the wearer's intellect acts as the central control system for manipulating the device. In this research work all common maneuvers needed for lift and transfer patients will be studied first. To meet the maneuverability requirements determined in this study, several architectures for the device will be designed. Then the actuators will be designed and built to behave inherently like Hill's model of the human arm. Adaptive control rules will be developed for this assist device which prevent human-induced instability in the presence of variations in the human dynamics. The control algorithm in the device also transfers to the nurse's arms, as feedback, a scaled-down value of the patient's actual weight. The hypothesis is that these devices, when used by nurses to maneuver patients, reduce the risk of back injuries in the nurses.