Collaborate Disseminate
You know, it’s just not fair. It seems that even if we stay active, age will eventually get the better of our muscles, robbing them of strength and our bodies …read more Continue reading Wearable Robot Makes Mountain Climbing a Breeze for Seniors
Robotics projects are always a favorite for hackers. Being able to almost literally bring your project to life evokes a special kind of joy that really drives our wildest imaginations. We imagine this is one of the inspirations for the boom in interactive technologies that are flooding the market these …read more
[Umar Qattan] is in tune with his sole and is trying hard to listen to what it has to say.
At a low level, [Umar] is building an insole with an array of force sensors in it. These sensors are affixed to a flexible PCB which is placed in a …read more
Continue reading Listen to your Feet, They Have a Lot to Tell You
Police could set up transceivers outside a building and compare spectrograms of suspects walking vs. crime scene footage. Continue reading Wi-Fi signals let researchers ID people through walls from their gait
The first thing to notice about [Bijuo]’s cat-sized quadruped robot designs (link is in Korean, Google translation here) is how slim and sleek the legs are. That’s because unlike most legged robots, the limbs themselves don’t contain any motors. Instead, the motors are in the main body, with one driving a half-circle pulley while another moves the limb as a whole. Power is transferred by a cable acting as a tendon and is offset by spring tension in the joints. The result is light, slim legs that lift and move in a remarkable gait.
[Bijuo] credits the Cheetah_Cub project as …read more
Continue reading Cat Robot’s Secret to Slim Legs? Banish the Motors!
There are a lot of ways to try to mathematically quantify how healthy a person is. Things like resting pulse rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygenation are all quite simple to measure and can be used to predict various clinical outcomes. However, one you may not have considered is gait velocity, or the speed at which a person walks. It turns out gait velocity is a viable way to predict the onset of a wide variety of conditions, such as congestive heart failure or chronic obtrusive pulmonary disease. It turns out, as people become sick, elderly or infirm, they tend …read more
You’ve got to walk before you can run, right? Perhaps not, if this bipedal dino-like running robot is any indication.
Officially dubbed a “Planar Elliptical Runner,” the bot is a test platform for bipedal locomotion from the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Taking inspiration from the gait of an ostrich — we think it looks more like a T. rex or velociraptor, but same difference — [Jerry Pratt]’s team at IHMC have built something pretty remarkable. Contrary to all the bipedal and quadrupedal robots we’ve seen, like Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog and PETMAN, which all fairly bristle with sensors …read more
Continue reading “Look Ma, No Gyros!”: A Self-Balancing Mechanical Velociraptor
You may not realize it, but how fast a person walks is an important indicator of overall health. We all instinctively know that we lag noticeably when a cold or the flu hits, but monitoring gait speed can help diagnose a plethora of chronic diseases and conditions. Wearables like Fitbit would be one way to monitor gait speed, but the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT thinks there’s a better way: a wireless appliance that measures gait speed passively.
CSAIL’s sensor, dubbed WiTrack (PDF), is a wall-mounted plaque that could be easily concealed as a picture or mirror. …read more
Continue reading Measuring Gait Speed Passively to Diagnose Diseases
Go into a fancy drug store, and you might just find one of the most amazing sales demonstrations you’ll ever see. Step right up, take your shoes off, and place your feet onto the magical Dr. Scholl’s machine, and you’ll get a customized readout of how your feet touch the ground. As an added bonus, you’ll also get a recommendation for a shoe insert that will make your feet feel better and your shoes fit better.
There is, of course, one problem with this setup. You don’t stand on a footprint measuring device all day. A better solution to the problem of …read more
