Empowering Augmented Mobility Of The Aging Population Using Computational Musculoskeletal Simulation

全国有近600万老年人，占老龄人口的一半，缺乏体育活动，造成健康状况不佳和流动性下降。为老龄化人口提供身体支持护理的相关需求和供应每年花费530万英镑。增强流动性使老龄化人口能够保持身体健康并提高与健康相关的生活质量。辅助机器人在应对老龄化人口所面临的流动性挑战方面表现出巨大的潜力。然而，目前关于辅助老年人行走的目标关节和辅助策略还没有统一的共识。此外，辅助机器人无法直接反映使用者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的信息量较少。本项目将开发一个计算模拟平台，以评估老年人使用辅助机器人行走的情况，并为优化设计和定制辅助策略提供定量科学证据。拟议的平台将通过将老龄化人口的个性化特征和辅助机器人模型从真实的世界转化为数字形式，在虚拟环境中模拟老年人与辅助机器人一起行走。通过结合真实世界的行走场景，工程师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。该仿真平台为有效设计和评估老年人行走辅助机器人提供了一种新的解决方案。它最终有助于老龄化人口保持流动性，并增加健康的预期寿命。

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.