Canghai Liu

Development of a Novel Pneumatic Power Assisted Lower Limb for Outdoor Walking by the Use of a Portable Pneumatic Power Source

In our previous research, a novel portable pneumatic power source, called a dry ice power cell, was proposed. In this paper, a novel pneumatic power assisted lower limb is developed by the use of the power of dry ice power cell. For those people whose muscle and balance remains in good condition but who have joint pain (hip or knee joint) in their leg and are unable to walk outdoors for long, the developed device can partially lift the patient in a comfortable way by pneumatic cylinder when the affected leg touches the floor, reducing the loads to which it is subject as well as the pain joint forces, thus relieving pain during walking. The developed device has the characteristics of a simple structure, low weight, easy to put on and take off and with sufficient capability to bear about 40% of the body weight during about 1000 steps of outdoor walking, using the power of dry ice power cell. The developed device can assist with outdoor walking not only over flat ground but also sloped and stair areas. In this paper, the structure and function and experiments involving the developed pneumatic power assisted lower limb are described in detail.

Internet-based Tele-rehabilitatioon System --Bilateral Tele-control with Variable Time Delay

This paper discussed an Internet-based telerehabilitation sharing system, which aims to achieve the situation where multiple stay home patients in different places can share rehabilitation instruction of one physical therapist at the same time. After the introduction, three main problems are described in this paper. Firstly the stability problem of the master-slave system with variable time delay which is the biggest problem of the tele-control system is focused on, the time delay and its effect to the system is described and the control architecture is proposed; then the operation method of the whole system with single-master and multi-slave is described; After that, the wound-tube actuator and tail-wrist which will be used as slave in the tele-rehabilitation system is introduced

Control of the parallel link mechanism by using hydraulic spool-in-cylinder

This paper presents the basic structure of the hydraulic spool-in-cylinder and its application on the 3-DOF rotational parallel link mechanism. The hydraulic spool-in-cylinder is an actuator which consists of a hydraulic cylinder, spool. mechanical feedback mechanism and stepping motor. The 3-DOF rotational parallel link mechanism consists of three spool-in-cylinders. We can simply realize the control of the high output hydraulic spool-in-cylinder by adjusting the input of the stepping-motor. The experiments show that the locomotion of the 3-DOF rotational parallel link mechanism can mimic the human wrist locomotion.