Preliminary Evaluation of a Powered Lower Limb Orthosis to Aid Walking in Paraplegic Individuals

This paper describes a powered lower-limb orthosis that is intended to provide gait assistance to spinal cord injured (SCI) individuals by providing assistive torques at both hip and knee joints. The orthosis has a mass of 12 kg and is capable of providing maximum joint torques of 40 Nm with hip and...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering 2011-12, Vol.19 (6), p.652-659
Main Authors: Farris, Ryan J., Quintero, Hugo A., Goldfarb, Michael
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Assistive technology
Biomechanical Phenomena
Electric Power Supplies
Electronics
Embedded systems
Equipment Design
Exoskeleton
Gait
Hip - anatomy & histology
Hip - physiology
Humans
Knee - anatomy & histology
Knee - physiology
Leg - anatomy & histology
Leg - physiology
Legged locomotion
Lower Extremity - anatomy & histology
Lower Extremity - physiology
lower limb exoskeleton
Male
Middle Aged
Noise
Orthotic Devices
paraplegia
Paraplegia - rehabilitation
Power demand
powered orthosis
spinal cord injured (SCI)
Spinal cord injuries
Spinal Cord Injuries - rehabilitation
Trajectory
Walking - physiology
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper describes a powered lower-limb orthosis that is intended to provide gait assistance to spinal cord injured (SCI) individuals by providing assistive torques at both hip and knee joints. The orthosis has a mass of 12 kg and is capable of providing maximum joint torques of 40 Nm with hip and knee joint ranges of motion from 105 ° flexion to 30 ° extension and 105 ° flexion to 10 ° hyperextension, respectively. A custom distributed embedded system controls the orthosis with power being provided by a lithium polymer battery which provides power for one hour of continuous walking. In order to demonstrate the ability of the orthosis to assist walking, the orthosis was experimentally implemented on a paraplegic subject with a T10 complete injury. Data collected during walking indicates a high degree of step-to-step repeatability of hip and knee trajectories (as enforced by the orthosis) and an average walking speed of 0.8 km/hr. The electrical power required at each hip and knee joint during gait was approximately 25 and 27 W, respectively, contributing to the 117 W overall electrical power required by the device during walking. A video of walking corresponding to the aforementioned data is included in the supplemental material.
ISSN:1534-4320
1558-0210
DOI:10.1109/TNSRE.2011.2163083