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Eldercare robot helps people sit and stand, and catches them if they fall
MIT engineers built E-BAR, a mobile robot designed to physically support the elderly and prevent them from falling as they move around their homes. E-BAR acts as a set of robotic handlebars that follows a person from behind, allowing them to walk independently or lean on the robot’s arms for support.
Extending out from the robot’s base is an articulated body made from 18 interconnected bars, or linkages, that can reconfigure like a foldable crane to lift a person from a sitting to standing position, and vice versa. Bolli envisions a design like E-BAR would be ideal for use in the home by elderly people who still have a moderate degree of muscle strength but require assistive devices for activities of daily living. But another project in Asada’s lab, led by graduate student Emily Kamienski, has focused on developing algorithms with machine learning to control a new robot in response to the user’s real-time fall risk level.
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