Team
Victoire Hespel
Marie Cordonnier
Pauline Boittiaux
Raphael Yrieix
Alexis Lhomme
Julie Mollon
Challenge
Taking different disabilites into account such as paraplegia and hemiplegia, we had the task to design the means of control of a personnal use exoskeleton. The challenge resided in designing with heavy accessibility in mind.
Solutions
Browsing for new technologies and due to the uniqueness of each user we made different ways of controlling the exoskeleton focusing on hand and head control to offer versatility.
Wandercraft is a french medical exoskeleton manufacturer. Their current exoskeleton "Atalante" is meant to be used inside medical facilities. Their new exoskeleton aims at being used at home by disabled people to facilitates their daily activities.
Our focus during this project was to design the means of control of this new exoskeleton.
Conveying interviews with disabled people was key in us understanding their daily strugles. It allowed us to identify opportunities such as hand free controls and being able to easily climb stairs. Drawing different scenarios and use cases of the exoskeleton as none of the interviewees used one before.
In addition to the interviews and our usual creativity process, I hosted a workshop with another team to have more ideas and a fresh look on our problematic
How might we provide a human/machine interface that controls a personal use exoskeleton lifting up the mental load of disabled people in their everyday activities throughout versatility and adaptability?
We went through clay mock-ups. Allowing us to experiment interfaces we found previously. This workshop helped us to discover new ways to interact with the exoskeleton.
Thanks to a bodystorming session, we’ve tested our prototype We had to find the right balance between intuitiveness and movement that cannot be triggered by accident.
EMG measures muscle response or electrical activity in response to a nerve’s stimulation of the muscle. We stumbled upon prototypes from META developped for their VR department meant to be used as VR controllers.
The watch is our main controller, hosting the different infrared captors to translate electrical activity inside the wrist combined to a gyroscope for more complexe gesture.
The bone-conduction headset is used as a gyroscope to tell the system the way the user is looking towards. It is also a mean of sending the user haptic and sound feedbacks.
As highlighted during interviews the biggest obstacle and challenge an exoskeleton has to face is to go up stairs and steps. We wanted to see if LiDAR sensors used in real time would be a nice implementation to the exoskeleton to detect obstacles in particular steps and stairs. The exoskeleton could automaticaly adjust the height of its step.
As the controls are at the core of our project we paid extra attention to them. We wanted the controls to be natural especially for people with disabilities with but at the same time not triggered by parasitic movements.
We distinguished actions performed from a still position to the ones in a moving state and adapted the triggers as well as the different feedbacks the user will receive.
Thanks to a unity prototype we were able to try out our controls in VR by mapping them to an Oculus controler and see how difficult the learning curve was. A VR experience could be a way to learn on how to operate the exoskeleton before actually jumping into one.
Unity prototype by Alex Lépine
In the latest 2023 Keynote Apple, highlighted new gesture controls with the last generation Apple watch. A double tap action triggering actions on the watch. This is has been rewarding in a way that we did end up proposing intuitive trigger gesture and that the technology is reliable.
Animation by Théophile Duponchel & Clément Jaqcuet