Even if some elderly patients lack muscle strength, they can wear exoskeletons to regain their grabbing and gesturing abilities. When paralyzed patients wear these exoskeletons, they can walk on their feet again.
Various portable rigid exoskeletons have been developed impaired patients wear these to regain functional abilities.
Rehabilitation-based exoskeletons are usually mounted on stationary facilities such as treadmills patients with stroke or injuries wear these exoskeletons for gait retraining or rehabilitation. Robotic rigid exoskeletons are commonly used for various applications, including action assistance, augmentation, and rehabilitation. The research results are expected to be beneficial for lightweight soft exoskeletons and integration with exosuits that provide assistive forces through the wearer’s entire gait. Comparisons proved that wearing the exoskeleton caused a negligible deviation of gait, and that the soft exoskeleton could reduce metabolic cost during walking. Subjects were measured while they wore our exoskeleton in power-off and power-on modes. A prototype was designed, fabricated, and examined with 7 subjects (average age, 24). The actuation was triggered when the system detected that the backward swing of the wearer’s thigh had ended. The slider pulled knee braces through cables with an assistive force of 100 N.
When the single motor rotated, the slider moved linearly, first in one direction and then in the opposite direction. The actuation mechanism was based on a pulley system that converted the power supplied by the single motor into linear reciprocating motions of a slider. Our design assists hip flexion for light weights and prevents some slip problems that can arise from rotary motors. Whereas conventional soft exoskeletons employ two motors to assist each leg individually, we designed a single motor for actuation.
In this research, we proposed a lower-limb soft exoskeleton for providing assistive forces to patients with muscle weakness during the preswing phase of a gait cycle.