Development of Lower Limb Power Assist Wear for Swing-up Motion Driven with Pneumatic Artificial Rubber Muscle

Abstract

Rehabilitation in convalescent stage is important to recovery of paralysis. The purpose of this study is to develop a wearable assist device like normal clothes to assist rehabilitation for paralyzed patient. This device called ‘Power Assist Wear’ is constructed with body and lower limb supporters, McKibben type artificial rubber muscles. This wear has many advantages such as flexible structure, light weight, and so on even though assistance force is not so high. In this paper, the structure and principle of this wear are described, and then control method to swing up a lower limb based on lower limb model is proposed. Proposed method is verified by using lower limb mannequin. Finally, assistance effect is confirmed from experimental results in which subject wears this device actually.