Control System Design for Electrical Stimulation in Upper Limb Rehabilitation: Modelling, Identification and Robust Performance

This book presents a comprehensive framework for model-based electrical stimulation (ES) controller design, covering the whole process needed to develop a system for helping people with physical impairments perform functional upper limb tasks such as eating, grasping and manipulating objects.

The book first demonstrates procedures for modelling and identifying biomechanical models of the response of ES, covering a wide variety of aspects including mechanical support structures, kinematics, electrode placement, tasks, and sensor locations. It then goes on to demonstrate how complex functional activities of daily living can be captured in the form of optimisation problems, and extends ES control design to address this case. It then lays out a design methodology, stability conditions, and robust performance criteria that enable control schemes to be developed systematically and transparently, ensuring that they can operate effectively in the presence of realistic modelling uncertainty, physiological variation and measurement noise.

control theory, rehabilitation engineering, biomechanics, clinical studies and user perspectives. The research he has led in control of ES has elicited two best conference paper awards (ICORR '09, UKACC '12), and two best journal paper awards (most recently `2013 IEEE Control Systems Society Outstanding Paper Award' based on `impact on the field of systems and control'). For example, his work using iterative learning control and adaptive control for stroke rehabilitation has met with an enthusiastic response from the research community, with invited workshops at IEEE BioRob Conference 2012, 18th IFESS Conference 2013, World Congress in NeuroRehabilitation 2014, as well as a plenary at IEEE International Workshop on nD Systems 2013. Citations for my research using both ES and advanced control in the last 5 years exceed 500.