The Upcoming Role for Nursing and Assistive Robotics: Opportunities and Challenges Ahead.

As an integral part of patient care, nursing is required to constantly adapt to changes in the healthcare system, as well as the wider financial and societal environment. Among the key factors driving these changes is the aging of population. Combined with an existing shortage of nursing and caregiving professionals, accommodating for the patients and elderly needs within hospitals, elderly-care facilities and at a home setting, becomes a societal challenge.

A structurally optimal control model for predicting and analyzing human postural coordination.

This paper proposes a closed-loop optimal control model predicting changes between in-phase and anti-phase postural coordination during standing and related supra-postural activities. The model allows the evaluation of the influence of body dynamics and balance constraints onto the adoption of postural coordination. This model minimizes the instantaneous norm of the joint torques with a controller in the head space, in contrast with classical linear optimal models used in the postural literature and defined in joint space.

A method for paraplegic upper-body posture estimation during standing: a pilot study for rehabilitation purposes.

This paper presents a contribution for restoring standing in paraplegia while using functional electrical stimulation (FES). Movement generation induced by FES remains mostly open looped and stimulus intensities are tuned empirically. To design an efficient closed-loop control, a preliminary study has been carried out to investigate the relationship between body posture and voluntary upper body movements.