Propose and verification of wearable walking assistance with motion transmission between legs

Abstract

In the aging society, walking assistance technology for hemiplegia has been focused on. Although the rehabilitation of gait motion has been developed, the walking assistance devices for daily life have still problems to become usable and sustainable device in daily life. In this paper, it was aimed to design and develop a new walking assistance mechanism which utilizes user’s residual function of unaffected side. A motion transmission mechanism between unaffected hip joint and affected hip joint was proposed, designed and prototype with simple leg model was created. By use of this prototype, some experiments were carried out. Consequently, the motion transmission between unaffected leg and the affected leg improved the symmetry of the leg motion and periodical features. Motion transmission improved symmetry of stance phase ratio in each stride between the unaffected leg and the affected leg.