Neuromuscular Functional Electrical Stimulation Method And Its Portable System

According to the occupational disease of pilots, using Functional Electrical Stimulation to prevent or cure the disease that caused by Muscular Dystrophy or Spinal Cord Injury, and help to recover the lost ability. It is important to increase the flying time and accelerate the progress of recovery. Also, provide the other patients which have the similar diseases with the effective recovery method. The burden on patients'family or society will be decreased too.The present research results had shown that controlling the limb movement accurately could improve the recovering result of paralysis muscles observably. At the meanwhile, it would help to recover the patients'neural function. Considering the non-linearity and time variety of stimulation, Neural Network (NN) was adopted to identify the FES model. The high precision muscle moving control on FES would also be implemented by combining the FES mechanism with NN. Basis on the above research, a multi-channel portable FES device was developed. Using the microprocessor, the stimulation parameters of each channel could be adjusted independently. The whole system would work well without any other control unit or computer. This will improve the conventional close-loop FES both on the platform structure and the feedback control method. The stimulation energy can be adjusted by changing the ratio of output pulses. Thus, the limb movement precision will improve furthermore. On the other hand, the simulation parameters can be modified online by the information that comes from the angle sensors near the limb joints. For the convenience of the different stages of patients, the portable FES device provides four work schemas with the professional or nonprofessional restorative training.The FES experiments and system-testing results had shown that the system was able to work stably and the control strategy could get the satisfied performance with error(<6.5%). The error and response delay decreased gradually in control process. Furthermore, The system could fit to the changes of the individual characteristic or work environment. So, the device met to the designing desire.