TY - GEN
T1 - Biomechanical Joint Design of Patient-Specific Rehabilitative Knee Exoskeletons for Misalignment Correction
AU - Chen, Chih Yu
AU - Frejat, Julia Martins
AU - Vaidyanathan, Ravi
AU - Drechsler, Klaus
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 IEEE.
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - Wearable robots, or exoskeletons, are solutions for rehabilitation and assisted motion. One of the challenges in designing a patient-specific knee exoskeleton is the complexity of the human knee joint. A single revolute joint cannot fully mimic the motion of a human knee, potentially causing misalignment between the exoskeleton and the human limbs. This human-exoskeleton misalignment then generates undesired interaction forces onto human limbs and hinders the agility of movement. This paper introduces a novel approach to designing a patient-specific biomechanical knee joint with a grooved cam. The joint design uses motion capture data of individual patients to generate cam profiles that allow for simultaneous rotational and translational motion in the designed system. Two biomechanical joints were designed for two subjects using the proposed design method. The designed cam joints were experimentally evaluated against a single-degree-of-freedom knee joint on both subjects as a proof of concept. The results demonstrate that the cam profiles were adequately generated, and the resulting joints effectively reduce misalignment compared to a single revolute joint.
AB - Wearable robots, or exoskeletons, are solutions for rehabilitation and assisted motion. One of the challenges in designing a patient-specific knee exoskeleton is the complexity of the human knee joint. A single revolute joint cannot fully mimic the motion of a human knee, potentially causing misalignment between the exoskeleton and the human limbs. This human-exoskeleton misalignment then generates undesired interaction forces onto human limbs and hinders the agility of movement. This paper introduces a novel approach to designing a patient-specific biomechanical knee joint with a grooved cam. The joint design uses motion capture data of individual patients to generate cam profiles that allow for simultaneous rotational and translational motion in the designed system. Two biomechanical joints were designed for two subjects using the proposed design method. The designed cam joints were experimentally evaluated against a single-degree-of-freedom knee joint on both subjects as a proof of concept. The results demonstrate that the cam profiles were adequately generated, and the resulting joints effectively reduce misalignment compared to a single revolute joint.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85208629589&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/BioRob60516.2024.10719729
DO - 10.1109/BioRob60516.2024.10719729
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85208629589
T3 - Proceedings of the IEEE RAS and EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics
SP - 801
EP - 805
BT - 2024 10th IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference for Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, BioRob 2024
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 10th IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference for Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, BioRob 2024
Y2 - 1 September 2024 through 4 September 2024
ER -