Adaptive impedance control of a robotic orthosis for gait rehabilitation

Shahid Hussain, Sheng Q. Xie, Prashant K. Jamwal

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

191 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Intervention of robotic devices in the field of physical gait therapy can help in providing repetitive, systematic, and economically viable training sessions. Interactive or assist-as-needed (AAN) gait training encourages patient voluntary participation in the robotic gait training process which may aid in rapid motor function recovery. In this paper, a lightweight robotic gait training orthosis with two actuated and four passive degrees of freedom (DOFs) is proposed. The actuated DOFs were powered by pneumatic muscle actuators. An AAN gait training paradigm based on adaptive impedance control was developed to provide interactive robotic gait training. The proposed adaptive impedance control scheme adapts the robotic assistance according to the disability level and voluntary participation of human subjects. The robotic orthosis was operated in two gait training modes, namely, inactive mode and active mode, to evaluate the performance of the proposed control scheme. The adaptive impedance control scheme was evaluated on ten neurologically intact subjects. The experimental results demonstrate that an increase in voluntary participation of human subjects resulted in a decrease of the robotic assistance and vice versa. Further clinical evaluations with neurologically impaired subjects are required to establish the therapeutic efficacy of the adaptive-impedance-control-based AAN gait training strategy.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1025-1034
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
Volume43
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2013
Externally publishedYes

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Adaptive impedance control of a robotic orthosis for gait rehabilitation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this