| Summary: | Mobility and immobility as fundamental aspects of a patient’s health. There are several factors that contribute to mobility impairments, including various medical conditions and injuries. Prolonged immobility has detrimental effects many of the body’s vital organ systems and decreases quality of life in general. Caregivers work to help patient with different levels of mobility perform necessary tasks. Severely immobile or bedridden patients are the most difficult to handle. Caregivers often experience musculoskeletal disorders lifting injuries in their line of work. Assistive devices were made to mitigate this, but their usage in practice is still limited, so caregiver injuries are still prevalent. This thesis presents a new idea that can automate in-bed motion, assistance to seated positions, and transfer for patients with severe immobility. Comfortable straps that wrap around the patient’s upper torso and thighs will be held by robot arms. The robot arms will perform movements that can control the torso and thigh angles, hip position in and out of the bed plane, and the normal force the bed provides at the hip. The control techniques described in this paper include closed loop control of a quasi-static formulation of the system and model-reference adaptive trajectory control. The results show there is promise in these methods to automate assistance of bedridden patients.
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