Development of a driver training simulator for use by stroke patients

Abstract

Stroke will affect around 60,000 people in 2009 with up to 40000 of those losing the ability to drive. This loss of independence and mobility can have a severe impact on their quality of life and emotional well being. Traditional methods of stroke rehabilitation are often therapist intensive or boring and repetitive. Robotic and semi-robotic devices for stroke rehabilitation are in their infancy with very few devices readily available in clinics and even less available in homes. The method of driver retraining relies on the therapist taking the patient “back on the road”, an often hair-raising and potentially dangerous task. A fully developed force feedback steering wheel and driving simulator for stroke patients has great potential for reducing therapist contact hours and increasing the effectiveness of driver retraining. The project aims to design, construct and test a force feedback steering wheel that is :- · suitable for use as a tool in the assessment and retraining of stroke patients · simple enough for both clinical and in-home use. · able to provide sufficient torque for passive resistance, active resistance, and active assistance · able to record user inputs as an aid to assessment and progress of driving ability Both the mechanical and electronic systems have been constructed. Torque is provided by a 100W 24V permanent magnet DC motor, connected to the steering shaft by a toothed belt with a gear ratio of 8.4:1. The motor is controlled via a PIC micro embedded microcontroller running custom written software while power amplification is handled by a 1 KW H-bridge motor control. In general, the testing and evaluation of the device has been promising, this is especially so in the overall feel of the device and the ability to control or vary the feel. Importantly the device has been successfully interfaced to the PC and is able to interact with a simple game environment. While some problems have been encountered a number of strategies have been devised to overcome these problems