Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry

BPI-PCR Robo-KII

Participant : Armel Crétual [contact] .

This contract has started in February 2017 and will last in October 2018. In M2S, it involves two permanent members of MimeTic team, Armel Crétual and Franck Multon, and two engineers, Antoine Marin (18 months grant) and Brice Bouvier (10 months grant).

This project is a collaboration between BA Healthcare and M2S lab. It aims at developing a robotics platform to allow physicians to start gait rehabilitation as soon as possible, even before patients are able to maintain upright posture alone. The usual way to perform such rehab sessions is to make the patient walk on a treadmill benefiting from a harness to prevent patient from falling. The two main limits of this approach are that:

• only straightforward at constant speed gaits are feasible whereas falling risks are much higher when modifying speed or turning

• walking on a treadmill when motor abilities are very affected can be challenging and can generate strong apprehension.

In a previous project, Robo-K, ended in september 2016, BA Healthcare has developed a first prototype of a mobile robot which strongly modified the approach: the harness is mobile and follows the patient displacement. In this way, the patient walks on the ground at his/her desired speed and the physician can include curved trajectories in the rehab process.

The main novelty of Robo-KII project is to implement a biofeeedback system onto the robotics platform to reinforce rehab sessions. Closely working with physicians from two PMR services, CHU Rennes and Kerpape center, we intend to define the optimal feedback to be given to the patients and to measure the corresponding gait parameters thanks to depth cameras mounted on the robot.