Authors:

Mai-Ly Thompson

Date Created:

Not specified

Course Title:

Professor:

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About Paper:

Designed for Children with Cerebral Palsy Lower-limb exoskeletons are important rehabilitation aids for clinical populations with gait impairments caused by neuromuscular diseases such as cerebral palsy. This condition causes crouch gait, which is characterized by increased knee flexion during gait. We have previously designed a knee exoskeleton that provides knee assistance to children with cerebral palsy during the gait cycle. However, the current exoskeleton engagement method is actuated by heel strike at early stance phase, which may be unreliable for individuals with toe-walking. We aimed to develop and test an electromechanical clutch for integration into a knee exoskeleton that: (1) engaged with both toe-walking and normal walking, (2) had a total mass less than 500g, (3) engaged quicker than 10ms, (4) was untethered, (5) and had an adjustable and easily integrable footswitch. To validate the clutch design, we recruited five participants to walk for 5 minutes toe-walking and 5 minutes normal walking. We plan to use ground reaction force data to capture foot falls (heel-strike or toe- strike) and motion capture data to measure the timing of and to validate spring engagement. 198

Source:

University of Florida / 2024

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Mai-Ly Thompson