Walking with WALK! A cooperative, patient-driven neuroprosthetic system

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to design WALK! a cooperative, patient-driven neuroprosthetic (NP) system. In implementing sensor-supervised events to switch to subsequent medical prosthetics, NP users were able to actively control the timing of their movements. Performance and usability of WALK! was appreciated by the NP users because they were able to perceive the activities of the NP to actually support their movements. The future of NP will be based on fully implanted systems. To justify the high efforts, risks, and costs of an implantation to both NP users and health care providers, NPs have to offer true functionality that can only be achieved by a sophisticated and yet practicable control system. We believe that the WALK! control approach presented in this article can be considered a valuable contribution to the development of future neuroprosthetic systems for locomotion.