Wearable Exoskeleton To Assist Lower-limb Rehabilitation Of Hemiplegic Patients

Lower-limb exoskeleton has made great progress in recent years to help hemiplegic patients regain normal walking ability.In the field of medical rehabilitation,the exoskeleton is expected to act on hemiplegic patients,so that patients can complete walking rehabilitation training independently without the help of doctors.It improves efficiency and reduces rehabilitation costs.However,most of the exoskeletons at this stage are basically for patients with complete paralysis who have lost walking ability due to spinal injury or other diseases,and they cannot be well applied to the rehabilitation walking of patients with mild hemiplegia.These exoskeletons are usually too bulky to easily wear and use;the controlling strategies are time-consuming and unsuitable for personalized training of different body types and different degrees of hemiplegia;if rigid driving method is used continuously,the lower limb muscles of affected side are not stimulated,causing muscle losing ability or even disability.There are many problems to be solved in patients' individualized rehabilitation training.In view of the above problems,this paper proposed a wearable lower limb exoskeleton which combines rigid bracket and cable driven method.Rigid frame provided support and protection,and cables provided appropriate forces.The control method of the affected side mimicking the healthy side was put forward so that individualized training was carried out.A method of machine vision was proposed for non-contact gait measurement.The exoskeleton can continuously correct impaired gait and provide assistance for lower-limb joints,so as to promote the rehabilitation of lower limb.The main contents of our work are as follows:Firstly,the physiological structure of human body was studied,and the difference between normal gait of healthy people and impaired gait of hemiplegic patients was theoretically analyzed.A gait measurement experiment was designed.The actual gait was obtained by using machine vision.Then,according to the requirement of correcting impaired gait,a humanexoskeleton multi-rigid body model was established,and the dynamic analysis and verification were carried out by using MATLAB and Adams software to obtain parameters for exoskeleton design.On this basis,a lower limb exoskeleton system was designed.In addition,the controlling strategy of the affected side mimicking healthy side was proposed to guide rehabilitation walking training.Finally,a prototype was manufactured and its performance was tested.The experimental results showed that this exoskeleton could not only correct patients' impaired gait,but also provide part of auxiliary forces for patients and reduce metabolic cost.The results of exoskeleton-assisting walking showed obvious benefits when compared with walking without any help.The exoskeleton has potential application prospects for rehabilitation walking training of hemiplegic patients.