How feasible is it for patients with a high degree of paraplegia to return to employment? The FRIEND robot assistant from Bremen makes it possible, enabling persons highly paralyzed as result of illness or accidents to return to gainful employment. FRIEND (Functional Robot arm with user-frIENdly interface for Disabled people) is capable of taking on a number of every-day activities – for instance, pouring a drink or preparing a meal. Research workers from the Institute of Automation (IAT) in the University of Bremen’s Faculty of Physics / Electrical Engineering will be presenting their achievement at the “REHACARE International 2012” trade fair that will be held from 10th till 13th October 2012 in Düsseldorf.
Model project in the University Library
Within the context of a pilot project called “ReIntegraRob”, FRIEND is already actively helping a tetraplegic woman who has lost the use of her arms and legs to work in the University Library. Lena Kredel owes her job to the project. Aided by the robot, she is now in charge of the so-called retrospective cataloguing of books – i.e. transferring conventional (card) catalogues to the machine-readable format used for the online catalogue. FRIEND assists Lena Kredel in her work: The robot picks books from a trolley and lifts them onto a specially designed mounting. Once they have been categorized, it closes the books and lays them back in the trolley. Ms. Kredel performs the actual cataloguing process and entering of the pertinent data with the aid of special speech-recognition software. The project is being funded by the Versorgungsamt Bremen (public agency for disabled persons) in an amount of more than EUR 400,000.
The Bremen research team will be presenting FRIEND, together with Ms. Kredel‘s complete work station, at the “REHACARE International 2012” in Düsseldorf. Visitors will find this in the area Themenpark Assistenzrobotik (booth G70/H, Hall 3). The robot is also the topic of a talk to be held during the REHACARE congress on Thursday 111th October 2012 (14:45 in room 6, CCD South). Lena Kredel will also be present to report on her experience working with FRIEND.
You can obtain more information on FRIEND under http://www.iat.uni-bremen.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=1090 or in a film report shown on the local TV program "buten und binnen" under www.radiobremen.de/fernsehen/buten_un_binnen/video34784-popup.html .
Contact:
Universität Bremen
Fachbereich Physik/Elektrotechnik
Institut für Automatisierungstechnik (IAT)
Dipl.-Math. Torsten Heyer
Phone: +49 (0) 421 / 218 62469
e-mail: theyerprotect me ?!iat.uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de
www.iat.uni-bremen.de
