A Novel Patient-Specific Ankle Orthosis with a Compliant Actuator for Drop-Foot Assistance

Abstract

Drop foot is a gait disorder that causes weakness of the ankle dorsiflexor muscles. To avoid common negative compensations with drop-foot, various drop-foot assistive robotic devices and technologies have emerged over time. Considering the current challenges discovered in the literature of the developed assistive robotic devices, the design of a compact compliant ankle orthosis specific to the needs of different patients was presented. The current work describes the design, synthesis, modeling, and simulation of the compliant ankle orthosis. The different components of the system that have been evaluated include its joint positioning mechanism, compliant stiffness mechanism, and connecting linkage mechanism that cooperatively achieves a bio-inspired portable and modular robotic device.

Date of Award	Dec 2022
Original language	American English
Supervisor	KINDA Khalaf (Supervisor)