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T. Schauer, C. Klauer, J Karner, W. Reichenfelser, M. Gföhler, E. Ambrosini, S. Ferrante, S. Zwicker, A. Pedrocchi:
"Feedback control of arm movements for a hybrid assistive system to support daily upper limb activities.";
Talk: Technically Assisted Rehabilitation, Berlin; 2013-03-14 - 2013-03-15; in: "Proc. TAR 2013", (2013), 4 pages.

This contribution investigates the restoration of reaching function in patients with upper motor
neuron lesion. Within the EU project MUNDUS a novel control strategy for a neuro-prosthesis has been
developed. Functional arm movements are generated by applying controlled Neuro-Muscular Electrical
Stimulation (NMES) to the shoulder deltoid muscle and the biceps. In addition to this, a spring-based
exoskeleton with three DOFs partially compensates for gravitation and allows to lock joint angles for holding
purposes. This is exploited by a feedback control strategy to reduce muscular fatigue. The control algorithm
sequentially controls the joint angles according to given references one after another. This robust approach
was evaluated with healthy subjects at first and then successfully applied to spinal cord injured (SCI) people.
A mean hand positioning error of less than 5 cm was observed for the employed control system.
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NMES, SCI, upper limb,

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_225023.pdf