Creativity@Home: REHABILITATIVE ELEGANT LOCOMOTION WITH EXOSKELETON AND ACTIVE SUPPORT FOR EXERCISE (RELEASE)

RELEASE is intended to explore the possibility of making an exoskeleton to support walking by people with locomotory difficulties with a driving ambition to make the technology invisible to casual observers yet liberating for the end user beyond the 'basic' issue of being able to walk. The project will start by gathering researchers from a variety of research fields - orthopaedics, neuroscience, mechanical engineering, nano technology, accessibility - and developing their collective appreciation of the challenges faced daily by people whose main means of locomotion is currently provided by substantial support such as walking frames, sticks, crutches or a wheelchair. This will be done by bringing the researchers together with people who currently experience these challenges and who can convey the impacts of these challenges on their quality of life, in a seminar activity based around the use of creativity-stimulation techniques including some of those learnt by ARG during its original C@H sessions. This seminar will determine (1) the quality of life desires of the potential end users of the technology, (2) the nature of the combined challenges for the researchers in the different researtch areas, (3) potential other research areas that might need to be incorporated in the team and (4) the overarching strategy for the rest of the RELEASE project.After this seminar, the PI will set tasks for the different research teams to bring back to the RELEASE team so that in the second collective session the details of the challenges can be discussed together in order to establish how progress might be made. The second collective session will take place about one month after the initial seminar. This will be followed by a sequence of further collective sessions over the 12 months of the project, in which challenges will be posed by the PI and responses brought back by the teams so that the overarching view of the feasibility of the technology can be developed by the team working together. Where the challenges need the researchers to unblock their normal creative channels, we will make use of a creativity facilitator to help open up further ways of ascertaining how to approach the problem. As the technical challenges become more apparent and detailed, the team will start to develop propsoals for more substantive research to explore ways in which the over-riding aim could be addressed. Towards the end of the 12 month period the collaborative sessions will turn to the development of these proposals so that future funding can be secured. End user groups will be involved in all of the collaborative sessions, especially where future work is being considered in order to ensure that the end aim of improving their quality of life is maintained.We will know the detailed nature of these challenges once the teams start working together, but as an illustration for this proposal, it is envisaged that we will need to determine the particular end user quality of life needs and setting these as the challenge to the technological developments, to convert current knowledge about biomechanics of walking into a form that could be 'conveyed' to a supportive exoskeleton-type technology, to explore the possibility of developing: a material that could be stiffened in response to a command, a means of controlling that stiffening across an expanse of that material so that it could be used to support movement as understood by the biomechanics issues, a means of making this material breathable so that it could be comfortable to wear, and a suitable energy system to enable all of the above to be achieved. We anticipate that these are great challenges, driven by the quality of life requirement, which will need further substantive research; RELEASE is about elucidating the questions that such substantive research will need to answer in order for such a possibility to be realised.

Ultimately RELEASE is the starting point for what we intend will be an applied assistive technology to enable people with limited locomotory capabilities to enhance their quality of life as a result of being able to walk more easily and participate more equally in a bipedal world. A first area for impact is therefore that improvement in quality of life. The second strand is the scientific and technical opportunities that can emerge from the attempt to generate a new approach to an exoskeleton which is much smarter - in concept, operation and appearance - than the current approaches. This will give a whole range of opportunities to industry to develop and improve the technology. Thirdly, and possibly the largest in many ways, is the impact of converting the quality of life as a driver of progress in assistive technology. RELEASE is pitched at TRL 1-3 (but mainly TRL 2) and thus the impacts beyond the research team arising from this project are likely to be in the form of raising awareness of a way of looking at the challenges arising from looking at locomotion assistance from a quality of life perspective and the indications of directions for further research to respond to these challenges in the future. Our approach to impact is therefore to maximise the means by which the research team as a whole can express this new approach in terms that end users, medical professionals and industry can understand. The pathways to impact will be managed by the PI and enacted by the ARG Impact Team, which is a standing group of ARG researchers whose terms of reference are to maximise the impact of the group's research. This will mean that the RELEASE impacts will be part of the wider ARG activity and will be incorporated in our standard impact approaches, such as the website and regular meetings with end users, researchers in disciplines such as occupational therapy, psychology and rehabilitation science, as well as industry. The RELEASE programme includes the development of ongoing research proposals and activities and many of these will be continued after the project end in order to maintain the benefits of this first stage in making a difference to the assistive technology designed to help people walk and thus achieve their own ambitions. We believe that RELEASE could be a good opportunity for the broadcast media - its visual characteristics and conjunction of science from nanotechnology to personal benefits for end users would be potentially quite attractive to the visual media in particular - and so we will be developing our connections with BBC Online with this in mind. The ARG Impact Team has regular informational sessions with BBC Online researchers and RELEASE will become one of the topics of conversation which eventually emerge into articles at the right time. We have found in the past that BBC Online is an excellent dissemination medium as it has a quality stamp that is recognised all over the world (previous ARG presence on BBC Online generated television programmes and newspaper articles in Germany and Canada which in turn led to enquiries from researchers all over the world for the use of our facilities for example).