Development of Active Gait Orthosis for Hybrid Assistive System with FES

为了恢复截瘫患者的行走能力，我们设计了一种配合功能性电刺激的辅助推车。一种新的刺激装置也被开发出来，以产生更自适应的刺激信号模式。实验对辅助小车的基本性能进行了评价。我们确认手推车比传统的助行器更容易调节。通过使用所提出的方法来识别下肢的动态参数，可以对每个患者进行调整。开发了用于估计预先指定运动的时间的传感装置，以便用户对所建议的调整方法感觉良好，并且通过主动辅助力减少了所需的肌肉力。实用的辅助系统将在不久的将来基于这些结果开发出来。特别地，所提出的调整系统以适应每个病人的方法以及所开发的致动器和传感器的专有技术将对实际设计有用。

So as to restore walking of paraplegic patients, we have designed an assisting cart which cooperates with functional electrical stimulation. A new stimulation device has also been developed to generate more adaptive patterns of stimulation signals. The basic performance of the assisting cart was evaluated experimentally. We confirmed that the cart is more adjustable than conventional walkers. The adjustment to each patient can be carried out by using proposed methods for indentifying dynamic parameters of lower extremities. Sensing devices for estimating a timing of a prespecified motion were developed so that the user feels well with the proposed adjustment method and the required muscle forces are reduced by the active assisting forces. Practical assistive systems will be developed in near future based on these results. Specially, the proposed methods for adjusting the system to each patient and the know-how with respect to the developed actuators and sensors will be useful for the practical design.