IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2022 - 45

Control Group (Doctor)
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Figure 9. The improved walking distance. (a) Manual rehabilitation and (b) robotic rehabilitation.
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Experimental Group (Robot)
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Figure 10. The improved FMA-LE marks. (a) Manual rehabilitation and (b) robotic rehabilitation.
and 28). After the removal of invalid data, the average improvement
with manual and robotic rehabilitation is 4.38 and 5.21
marks, respectively, which also proves the effectiveness of
robotic rehabilitation. The field performance of BEAR-H
can be found in the multimedia attachment.
Discussion
The current weight of BEAR-H is 24 kg, which is more or less
at the same level as EksoNR (27 kg) and ReWalk (23.3 kg).
The weight of BEAR-H can be reduced by replacing the battery
with a lower-volume and replaceable one. Additionally, a
titanium alloy or carbon-fiber material can be used in the
mechanical structure of BEAR-H in future versions to further
reduce its weight but with a higher cost as the tradeoff. Furthermore,
other advanced actuators (e.g., shape-memory
alloys [20]) may be implemented in the robot; however, these
have a relatively lighter weight but are less stable and reliable
due to their nonlinearity, and thus may not be suitable for formal
deployment in commercial products at their current stage.
Conclusions
This article reported the development of BEAR-H, a new,
intelligent lower-limb exoskeleton designed for smart rehabilitation.
Compared to other rehabilitation robots, BEAR-H has
the following intelligent features: 1) The robot can recognize
the gait events of the patient and then automatically synchronize
the reference trajectory with the actual gait of the patient;
2) a cloud-based management platform is established to allow
doctors and family members to monitor the progress of the
rehabilitation, and such a platform also provides access to personalized
files with history data to quickly understand the
overview of the whole procedure; and 3) the individualized
gait-generation scheme is proposed to retrieve the original
healthy pattern of a specific patient by exploring the big data of
different healthy subjects such that the generated gait can well
suit the patient and guarantee the effect of rehabilitation. The
safety of BEAR-H is guaranteed in both the hardware and software.
In terms of hardware, all the joints are driven by compliant
actuators (which is first among all commercialized
products thus far). For software, an adaptive impedance controller
is proposed to regulate the relationship between interaction
torque and joint angle in the presence of uncertain
dynamics, and the realization of the impedance model also
provides a certain level of free moving space, therefore suiting
the rehabilitation paradigm of assistance as needed. The performance
of BEAR-H has been validated in clinical trials.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under grant 61803321; Institute
SEPTEMBER 2022 * IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE *
45
9
7
2 3
FMA (Marks)
Distance (m)
FMA (Marks)
Distance (m)

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2022