| Ankle Foot Orthosis (AFO) is a type of ankle brace for providing assistant force support on the patient's ankle. The research was focused on the structure redesigning, gait cycle analysis and Rapid Prototyping-Ankle Foot Orthosis testbed design.;It is tried to provide a. new assembling AFO design, so that lower cost along with a standard process are achieved in order to build a customized AFO. The formal AFO structure was an integrated design. The integrated design was separated into three parts, a. customized base, a. function bar and a standard cuff. The customized base was built by rapid-prototyping method. The surface of the patient's ankle was modeled by the 3D scanner and then built by the 3D printer. The function bar worked as a spring. When the patient is walking, the bar could store the energy and release it. In this process, the weight of the patient is transferred to the spring's potential energy and then the energy is transferred as an assistive force. During designing the structure, it has been tried to provide a range of materials and sizes to meet the different needs of patients who need different assistant levels. The Finite Element Analysis (FEA) was completed on several regular materials. There was no way to formulate or calculate the shape of the AFO, since a customized AFO should be based on the certain patient. As a result, the RP-method was only for assistance, and hence, this work focused on providing the guidance for designing an eligible AFO for a certain patient at a certain status. The standard cuff has a range of sizes, and it could be adjusted by the patients at any time.;The testbed for the AFO was based on the gait cycle analysis. For the testbed, an ankle foot simulation system was built. Using this testbed, the AFO can continue working for several hours, so that fatigue results for the proposed AFO can be obtained. The underlying principle here is to test the AFO design rather than simulating the human ankle foot. Hence, some necessary simplification was applied. For this, some necessary degrees of freedom were retained while the rest were eliminated. Three concept designs were compared and then one final design was built. A simple PID controller was designed and implemented as the control system for the testbed. The test result demonstrated the feasibility of the design and applicability of the testbed. |
