Empowering Augmented Mobility Of The Aging Population Using Computational Musculoskeletal Simulation

由于健康状况不佳和行动不便，全国近600万老年人（占老龄人口的一半）缺乏体育活动。为老龄人口提供物理支持护理的相关需求和供应每年花费530万英镑。增强流动性使老年人口能够保持身体健康并促进与健康有关的生活质量。辅助机器人在应对人口老龄化带来的行动挑战方面显示出巨大的潜力。然而，目前对于帮助老年人行走的目标关节和辅助策略并没有统一的共识。此外，辅助机器人不能直接提示用户的努力和能量变化的影响，这使得实验评估在设计和评估中信息量不足。该项目将开发一个计算仿真平台来评估老年人使用辅助机器人的行走情况，并为优化设计和定制辅助策略提供定量的科学依据。该平台将通过将现实世界中老年人的个性化特征和辅助机器人模型转化为数字形式，模拟老年人在虚拟环境中与辅助机器人一起行走。通过结合现实世界的步行场景，工程可以利用肌肉力量和能量消耗的变化来确定最佳的机器人设计和定制辅助策略。所提出的仿真平台为老年人辅助行走机器人的有效设计和评估提供了一种新的解决方案。它最终帮助老年人口保持流动性，延长健康预期寿命。

Nearly 6 million elderly people nationwide, half of the aging population size, are physically inactive, with the consequence of ill-health conditions and decreased mobilities. The associated demand and supply of physical support care for the aging population have cost £5.3 million a year. Empowering mobility enables the aging population to preserve their physical fitness and promote health-related quality of life. Assistive robots have shown great potential for combating the mobility challenges experienced by the aging population. However, there are not currently unified consensuses about targeted joints and assistive strategies for assisting the elderly walking. Moreover, assistive robots fail to give direct clues on the effects of the user's efforts and energy changes, which renders experimental evaluations less informative in the design and evaluation.The project will develop a computational simulation platform to evaluate the elderly walking with assistive robots and provide quantitative scientific evidence for optimal designs and customized assistive strategies. The proposed platform will simulate the elderly walking with assistive robots in a virtual environment by translating personalised characteristics of the aging population and models of assistive robots from the real world into digital forms. By incorporating real-world walking scenarios, engineering can exploit changes in muscular efforts and energy consumption to identify optimal robot design and customize assistive strategies. The proposed simulation platform provides a new solution to design and evaluate assistive robots for the elderly walking in an effective manner. It ultimately helps the aging population maintain mobility and increases healthy life expectancy.