An AR-based mobile robot system for gait training

Abstract

Gait training is an important rehabilitation exercise for lower-extremity patients to recover their ability to walk. However, existing gait training that makes use of treadmills or robotic assistive systems differs from the actual walking environment on the ground because they repeat similar treatments in restricted treatment rooms. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new type of gait training system that combines a mobile robot with virtual reality. The proposed system is a mobile system that augments virtual content for gait training on real ground. Our proposed system differs from conventional robotic-assisted gait training in terms of making a patient interact with the content. In addition, there is another advantage in that the space is not limited during gait training because a mobile robot is used. Two experiments were conducted, and the results were used to examine the performance of our proposed system.