The i-Walker: An Intelligent Pedestrian Mobility Aid - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 98

that this assistance will provide the users with a feeling of safety and autonomy that
will encourage them to move about more, incurring the benefits of walking and helping
them to carry out the activities of daily living (ADLs).
Another related problem is the lack of strength in target population. Doctors make
us conscious of the possible uneven loss of strength in the extremities. This of course is
the main reason for having troubles in arising from a chair, in walking, being unable to
steer a normal walker, being unable to standing still, etc .
We have developed a robotically augmented walker to reduce fall risk and confusion,
and to increase walker convenience and enjoyment. Among of the SHARE-it objectives
were to build different i-Walker workbench platforms, oriented to demonstrate their
feasibility, and gain the confidence to support the specific disabilities [6].
The idea of building robotic walking aids is not new. This robotic aids are equipped
with mechanisms for communication, interaction, and behaviors are employed more
and more outside the industrial and experimental settings and are arriving to serve elder
citizens or people with disabilities to make them less dependable and therefore aug-
menting their personal autonomy. Most existing robotic devices are active aids - mean-
ing that they are capable to share control over motion with the user - and are aimed at
obstacle avoidance and path navigation. Two inspiring works in this line for pedestrian
aids are [10][29].

1.1 Plan of the Chapter
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows: In section 2 we make a general de-
scription of the target population. In section 3 we introduce our ideas on Shared Auton-
omy related with the support to the elders. In section 4 we introduce our new intelli-
gent pedestrian mobility aid that we call i-Walker . We also introduce in this section the
agent-based control elements.
In section 5 we introduce the generic scenarios and in section 6 the i-Walker bench-
mark is described where the i-Walker is currently in limited testing, to assure its safeness
and soundness, before to go to a full-scale testing with real users from the target popu-
lation. In section 7 we present our conclusions and future plans for this research in the
frame of SHARE-it .

2 Aging and Mobility

Transportation and mobility are closely linked to autonomy, well being, and quality of
life. A critical factor in an older person's ability to function independently is mobility,
the ability to move without assistance [12,9] . Older people who lose mobility are less
likely to remain in the community, have higher rates of morbidity and mortality, have
more hospitalizations, and experience a poorer QoL [1].
In fact, mobility in addition to represent one of the most important Basic ADL - like
defined in the Bartel Index [16] - is directly involved in many basic and instrumen-
tal ADL activities like transferring, grooming, toileting, housekeeping, etc. For adults,
independent mobility is an important aspect of self-esteem and plays a pivotal role in
aging in place [24]. For example- as Simpson suggest- if older people find it increas-
ingly difficult to walk or wheel themselves to the commode, they may do so less often