Human Movement Control

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Control theory is used to design automatic systems, which are able to maintain a desired behaviour despite of the disturbances. It is present in different machines we use every day; in fact, technical systems in our homes and all the industries are hard to imagine today without these concepts. Moreover, the same theories can be used for modelling life processes as a collection of inputs, outputs, plants and control loops. Feedback is one of the main concepts behind control; in particular, several examples of physiological control mechanisms for regulating life aspects can be found in the human anatomy, for example, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, body movements, the equilibrium, etc. Those processes can be damaged by the aging effects, diseases, accidents or when the mechanism has been broken and cannot be recovered naturally; consequently, it will be required external assistance. A relative new field in control theory is related with developing technology for helping with physiological and medicals problems. However, in comparison with machines, those physiological processes are highly nonlinear, with delays and slow responses. Another problem is when human becomes the operators using their capacities of decision making to close the control loop, as they are prone to errors and mistakes. For those reasons, the biomedical system needs to be carefully designed and several aspects have to be considered. This chapter gives a small review of some internal and external control processes within the human body and discusses how to interact with them for designing biomedical devices. Under this design scheme, a practical application of a smart electric wheelchair for assisting persons with strong disabilities is presented. These assistive robotic systems are in close contact with the user, and thus, it is determinant to have a user-friendly relation between the human and the interface. Therefore, intuitive interfaces were included in the design and an intelligent navigation assistant to guarantee a collision-free path.