Improvement And Evaluation Of The Unloading Force Of An Overall Unloading Knee Brace

The knee joint is the human body's biggest and most complicated joint.It bears large amount of weight and moves very often,which makes it the key part during the lower limbs' motion.As a result,the rate of injury and abnormality of knee is the highest amount all of the human joints.One of the most common disease is the osteoarthritis.The most common symptoms are joint pain and stiffness.Apart from medical sand operational treatment,wearing knee brace is another safer method to slow down the development of disease and to reduce the pain as well as help patients recovering.The overall unloading knee brace provides unloading force by transforming the rotation of the knee brace to the linear displacement of the thigh support,by which the overall unloading knee brace can provide with pulling force,namely the unloading force to reduce partly the knee's load.According to the principle as discussed,if the unloading force can be increased then the function of this kind of knee brace will be improved.This paper firstly introduces the mechanical design and working principle of the overall unloading knee brace and analyses its kinematic and dynamic features.And then the generation of unloading force and key factors that influence it are analysed.Secondly,this paper has discussed the method of adding non-slip protuberance of different density to the thigh support's surface.This paper explains in detail how to build a experiment system to measure the unloading force and also how to build a wireless realtime temperature and humidity monitoring system to evaluate how those protuberance will affect the microclimate between the support and the thigh skin.Thirdly,the influence of initial pressure on the unloading force is analyzed and relevant calculations and finite element analysis are made to see how the initial pressure will affect the energy cost and the pressure and shear force of the thigh skin.At last,this paper evaluate both of the two methods mentioned above their capabilities in improving the unloading force and their influences on the thigh skin.