Abstract:
This paper presents a novel self-aligning knee mechanism for walking assistance devices for the elderly to provide physical gait assistance. Self-aligning knee joints can...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel self-aligning knee mechanism for walking assistance devices for the elderly to provide physical gait assistance. Self-aligning knee joints can assist in flexion/extension motions of the knee joint and compensate the knee's transitional movements in the sagittal plane. In order to compensate the center of rotation, which moves with the flexion/extension motion of the human knee joint, a self-aligning knee joint is proposed that adds redundant degrees of freedom (i.e., 2-DoF) to the 1-DoF revolute joint. The key idea of the proposed mechanism is to decouple joint rotations and translations for use in lower-extremity wearable devices. This paper describes the mechanical design of this self-aligning knee mechanism and its implementation on a wearable robot and in preliminary experiments. The performance of the proposed mechanism is verified by simulations and experiments.
Published in: 2016 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)
Date of Conference: 16-20 August 2016
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 18 October 2016
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PubMed ID: 28268772