Abstract
The purpose of this study is to estimate the ankle joint impedance, which plays an important role in human walking. We develop a wearable device to impose sinusoidal perturbations on the ankle and to measure the perturbation torque and the angular deformation. The device employs a link mechanism, which is equipped with a servo motor, strain gages and a potentiometer. The device gives us the frequency response of the ankle. The transfer function is derived from the response, and then, the impedance parameters correspond to its denominator. The experimental result indicates that although the gain data deviate from the ones presented by the related study, the phase data are reasonable.
