Tactile Handle for an Instrumented Cane.

Abstract

Tactile sensors are useful input devices to implement human machine interfaces in areas such as rehabilitation or assistance. They can prevent damage from accidents or bad usage, and also provide rich information to infer human behavior from the pressure distribution at the contact interface. This paper introduces an instrumented cane handle equipped with a tactile sensor. The electronics devoted to data acquisition, pre-processing and communication is described. Furthermore, results from tests with different users are shown to illustrate how the information provided by the tactile sensor is related to the gait and can be exploited for research or as control input in an active cane.