Simplified Motor Primitives for Gait Symmetrization: Pilot Study with an Active Hip Orthosis

Abstract

Lower-limb exoskeletons are wearable devices whose main purposes are human rehabilitation and bilateral locomotion assistance. In particular, there is a growing interest for their use to symmetrize the gait of hemiparetic patients. This often consists in using the kinematics of the less affected side as a reference for the most affected one. In this work, we followed this approach to design a symmetrization algorithm using the formalism of motor primitives, i.e. a low-dimensional set of signals that provide the desired assistance through their combination. The amount of variables to be stored in memory is thus intrinsically limited, and this framework is particularly adapted to include other modes of assistance and/or transitions between locomotion tasks. In this paper, we report the preliminary validation of this newly developed algorithm with a hip exoskeleton and a single participant replicating hemiparetic walking. Results show that the algorithm effectively managed to reduce both temporal and spatial gait asymmetry.