Robotic Crawling Assistance for Infants with Cerebral Palsy

Infants at risk for cerebral palsy are at a severe disadvantage in learning to crawl as compared with typically developing infants. An assistive system is being created at the University of Oklahoma to improve these children's crawling abilities. The infants are: outfitted with a suit that allows kinematic reconstruction of their movements; EEG monitoring of their neural responses; and placed in an assistive robot that can amplify the effectiveness of their crawling actions and reduce the required weight bearing for successful prone locomotion. The system can also map their attempted motions into a library of recognized movements, and create directed robot motion even when the subject has not generated any propulsive forces on their own.