Examination of the followability of the Crutch-Walk Assisting Walker connected to the waist using the harness to the movement of the user

Abstract

The authors are developing a new shape walker. The purpose of this walker is to allow quantitative training of walking with a crutch safely. For this reason, it is highly necessary to examine the influence of a walker on human walking. We measured the changes in stride length, stride, and pelvic sway during use to confirm safety. However, it is necessary to evaluate the delay time during walking to examine the influence and operability of the walking walker on human walking. In this paper, we calculated the delay time between human and walker by cross correlating the acceleration in the direction of travel between human and walker and evaluated the influence of walker. As a result, it was found that neither of the two walkers with different frame sizes had a dangerous movement that pulled the human body. It was also found that the delay time increases as the size increases. Besides, it was found that the lag time was significantly longer and the variance tended to be larger in walking with a cane than with normal walking.