Abstract
Patients of knee arthropathy such as knee osteoarthritis have been increasing due to increasing population of elderly people. Such arthropathy is caused by initial wear of a knee cartilage followed by deformation of lower limb skeleton causing inflammation in a knee joint. A pain occurring from the inflammation makes patients have difficulty walking in daily lives and increases the likelihood of having lifestyle related diseases such as osteoporosis. Among conservative treatments, knee braces are used by the patients in an orthotic treatment. In the research, knee braces with linkage mechanisms developed to reduce the pain in knee joint felt by the patients were used. Specifically, the knee braces lighten the force by distributing weight of the upper body to their bars and reducing the force acting on the surface of the knee joint. In the experiments, three kinds of knee braces for a left foot each containing different lengths of 4 bar linkage in the medial side were used. The experiment was done by first attaching strain gauges to the bars of the braces to measure the strains on the bars. The subject next wore the braces in order to measure the strains that occur while sitting (flexing knee) and standing (extending knee). Finally, compression forces on the bars were calculated from the strains measured in order to evaluate the percentage of body weight distributed from the joint to the bars.
