Intelligent Robotic Rehabilitation Systems

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MEng course has covered several aspects of research and statistics in several modules and in addition to this my final year project has been within the Robotic Research group at the University of Birmingham and has necessitated learning to work with new research focused software's, support grant applications with the relevant research papers and working with statistical means of analysis.The project that I am applying to research for is the Birmingham Gait Robotic Rehabilitation Systemcurrently in development by members of the Robotic Research Group under Dr.Saadat. As part ofmy final year project at The University of Birmingham I worked alongside members of this group inseveral different roles.I first helped contribute to a grant application for which the design of the robotic system had beenchanged by a current PhD student and I designed the supporting structure and environment in whichthe system would be used. I approached this challenge from a Human-Centred Design (HCD) asoutlined in International Standards, ISO 9241-210, 2011, a point of view which involved ensuring thedesign utilised skills and expertise from a wide range of areas. This involved research into existingmodels, the current field of rehabilitation technology and patient psychology to ensure that thedesign was fit for purpose.After this grant application was put in I worked on gait analysis of an experiment that had beenperformed for the research group a few years ago. This data had been utilised in several ways in thepast but the goal of the current analysis was to compare the control subjects and the StrokeSurvivors via statistical means with the goal of using the results to validate or suggest improvementsto the current design of the BGRRS.I wish to take this project further by bringing in a different set of skills to the group as well asaugmenting existing ones. This would mean that we would be able to build the device based off ourown research which would guide the project to ensure that the end design was something thatwould be well suited to both the patients and physiotherapists and would also be achievable from afinancial and manufacturing point of view.During this project, I would expect that we would need to fill gaps in the literature with our ownnovel work to further our knowledge and expertise in the subject to ensure that the project is asuccess. This would range from working on validating the design of robot against competitors toshow the improvements made, e.g showing correlation in increased degrees of freedom for theankle and an increase in rehabilitation in the user, to designing new control schemes and mechanicalfeatures to realise these goals.