Summary

A normal healthy person’s ability to transfer oneself from one point to another solely depends their lower limbs. This activity of transfer, or commonly known as walking/ambulation is a key factor in functional independence and overall quality of life. Factors ranging from congenital abnormalities, trauma, surgery, stroke, obesity and age, has been found to reduce/restrict the normal usage of the lower limbs of within a substantial amount of the world population. They require either continued external force assistance to walk/move or short term assistive motion to rehabilitate their lower limbs to regain normal activities. This force assistance will improve their natural motions and help to improve his/her quality of life.

An active wearable soft exoskeleton system can be used to provide this external assistance to the wearer. Only a handful of basic exoskeleton systems have been develop globally. These systems are limited to lab research and do not satisfactorily meet the needs of a person with lower limb paresis or paraplegia. Various control methods of exoskeleton systems have been reported in literature, but there is an immense gap in terms of controller design for soft wearable exoskeleton systems utilizing soft actuators. With the lack of research in these areas, there are no commercially available soft wearable exoskeleton systems. In the Sri Lankan context, significant research is yet to be in progress in this area of assistive and rehabilitative robotics. Therefore, there is a clear necessity in developing a proper design and proper control system to be used in soft wearable exoskeleton systems to assist the motions of the lower limb. This research will lead to the design and development of a prototype soft wearable exoskeleton system to be used by people with lower limb paresis or paraplegia.

Objectives

1. Design and develop a soft actuator to generate assistive force for use in an orthotic device
2. Design and develop a 16 degree of freedom orthotic device/exosuit to provide assistive motion to the lower limb with spinal support
3. Evaluate and validate the effectiveness of the generated motion of the exosuit
4. Develop a control method to robustly control the lower limb exosuit
5. Evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control method with the exosuit by carrying out experiments

Major Equipment Facilitated by Grant