Brake Assist Mechanism for Reducing Landing Impact on Descending a Mountain by Foot

Abstract

Recently, climbing has become more and more popular, while the accidents of falling down at descending a mountain remain a huge problem. The main reason of these accidents is considered muscle fatigue due to the load on the legs by stretching leg’s muscle and absorption of landing impact. This kind of muscle activity is called as eccentric contraction, which often causes muscle damage. As a support method of walking in descending a mountain without any power supply, authors devised the idea that reducing the knee flexion load by braking flexion and landing impact by making the time longer to flex. Based on this idea, we developed the novel device containing the brake mechanism with a hydraulic rotary damper suitable for continuous motion such as a walking and a floating gear having unidirectionality. After that, the result of performance test demonstrated that the device exerts braking force enough to brake the human knee joint torque.