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Functional Electrical Simulation
(FES) of the muscles is one of the
methods which helps paraplegic patients
to move their paralyzed limbs. Despite the noticeable progresses in this field, there are still some problems and
ambiguities that should be addressed to
predispose more success of the FES
method. In this paper rising from a chair or Sit-to-Stand (STS) transfer is studied.
Paraplegic patients need to use their
hands during STS transfer for various reasons. The affect of hand usage appears
in the form of the voluntary movements of the upper body. To the best of our knowledge, in the design of the FES controllers the voluntary movement of the
upper body during standing up has not yet been effectively taken into account. To simulate patient's decision making during STS transfer, a rule-based fuzzy controller is presented. This controller in connection with human body-skeletal
dynamics model make a virtual patient which can be used to develop FES controllers. To adjust the controller parameters a supervised learning algorithm is applied. Simulation results
indicate that average error between the
movement characteristics (such as spatial displacement of the body center of
gravity) of the virtual and real patient is
less than 6.04%.