Development of Powered Knee Orthosis for FES-Assisted Knee Swing

Abstract

Recently, Powered Knee Orthosis (PKO) becomes an essential assisting device in serving rehabilitation activities such as gait, neuropathic gait and stroke gait. Existing PKOs are mainly designed to perform rehabilitation activities and most of them fully utilized PKO to drive knee movement. This may contributed to discouragement of the voluntary able-body to perform knee movement activities and led to muscle degradation. This paper presents the development of PKO for knee swing activities aided by functional electrical stimulation, FES. The PKO is designed with high back-drive ability to allows FES-assisted movement during knee extension. The experiments were implemented on two healthy subjects performing knee swing for three different conditions; Knee swing with PKO, with FES and with both FES and PKO. The knee angle movement were measured and recorded. The results demonstrate the successful of the proposed FES-assisted knee swing with PKO. Thus the developed PKO is able to contribute to the FES-assisted knee swing activities.