An Assistive Ankle Joint Exoskeleton for Gait Impairment

Motor rehabilitation and assistance post-stroke are becoming a major concern for healthcare services with an increasingly aging population. Wearable robots can be a technological solution to support gait rehabilitation and to provide assistance to enable users to carry out activities of daily living independently. To address the need for long-term assistance for stroke survivors suffering from drop foot, this paper proposes a low-cost, assistive ankle joint exoskeleton for gait assistance. The proposed exoskeleton is designed to provide ankle foot support thus enabling normal walking gait. Baseline gait reading was recorded from two force sensors attached to a custom-built shoe insole of the exoskeleton. From our experiments, the average maximum force during heel-strike (63.95 N) and toe-off (54.84 N) were found, in addition to the average period of a gait cycle (1.45 s). The timing and force data were used to control the actuation of tendons of the exoskeleton to prevent the foot from preemptively hitting the ground during swing phase.