Dynamical analysis and design of active orthoses for spinal cord injured subjects by aesthetic and energetic optimization

Abstract

The dynamic analysis and simulation of human gait using multibody dynamics techniques has been a major area of research in the last decades. Nevertheless, not much attention has been paid to the analysis and simulation of robotic-assisted gait. Simulation is a very powerful tool both for assisting the design stage of active rehabilitation robots and predicting the subject–orthoses cooperation and the resulting aesthetic gait. This paper presents a parameter optimization approach that allows simulating gait motion patterns in the particular case of a subject with incomplete spinal cord injury (SCI) wearing active knee–ankle–foot orthoses at both legs. The subject is modelled as a planar multibody system actuated through the main lower limb muscle groups. A muscle force-sharing problem is solved to obtain optimal muscle activation patterns. Furthermore, denervation of muscle groups caused by the SCI is parameterized to account for different injury severities. The active orthoses are modelled as external devices attached to the legs, and their dynamic and performance parameters are taken from a real prototype. Numerical results using energetic and aesthetic objective functions, and considering different SCI severities are obtained. Detailed discussions are given related to the different motion and actuation patterns both from muscles and orthoses. The proposed methodology opens new perspectives towards the prediction of human-assisted gait, which can be very helpful for the design of new rehabilitation robots.