Citation

Byungjune Choi, Younbaek Lee, Jeonghun Kim, Minhyung Lee, Jongwon Lee, Se-Gon Roh, Hyundo Choi, Yong-Jae Kim, Jung-Yun Choi. Conf. Proc. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Soc. 2016; 2016: 2222-2227.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers))

DOI

10.1109/EMBC.2016.7591171

PMID

28268772

Abstract

This paper presents a novel self-aligning knee mechanism for walking assistance devices for the elderly to provide physical gait assistance. Self-aligning knee joints can assist in flexion/extension motions of the knee joint and compensate the knee's transitional movements in the sagittal plane. In order to compensate the center of rotation, which moves with the flexion/extension motion of the human knee joint, a self-aligning knee joint is proposed that adds redundant degrees of freedom (i.e., 2-DoF) to the 1-DoF revolute joint. The key idea of the proposed mechanism is to decouple joint rotations and translations for use in lower-extremity wearable devices. This paper describes the mechanical design of this self-aligning knee mechanism and its implementation on a wearable robot and in preliminary experiments. The performance of the proposed mechanism is verified by simulations and experiments.

Language: en