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Hybrid Active–Passive Prosthetic Knee: A Gait Kinematics and Muscle Activity Comparison with Mechanical and Microprocessor-Controlled Passive Prostheses

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Abstract

Existing microprocessor-controlled passive prosthetic knees (PaPKs) and active prosthetic knees (AcPKs) cannot truly simulate the muscle activity characteristics of the active–passive hybrid action of the knee during the normal gait. Differences in EMG between normal and different prosthetic gait for different phases were never separately analyzed. In this study, a novel hybrid active–passive prosthetic knee (HAPK) is proposed and if and how muscle activity and kinematics changes in different prosthetic gait are analyzed. The hybrid hydraulic-motor actuator is adopted to fully integrate the advantages of hydraulic compliance damping and motor efficiency, and the hierarchical control strategy is adopted to realize the adaptive predictive control of the HAPK. The kinematic data and EMG data of normal gait and different prosthetic gait were compared by experiments, so as to analyze the changes in the muscle activity and spatio-temporal data per phase compared to normal walking and the adaptations of amputees when walking with a different kind of prosthesis (the mechanical prosthesis (MePK), the PaPK and the HAPK). The results show that changes in prosthetic gait mainly consisted of decreased self-selected walking speed, gait symmetry and maximum knee flexion, increased first double support phase duration, muscle activation in both opposed and prosthetic limb and inter-subject variability. The differences between controls and MePK, PaPK and HAPK decreases sequentially. These results indicate that the hybrid active–passive actuating mode can have positive effects on improving the approximation of healthy gait characteristics.

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Data availability

The datasets analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62073224, the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2018YFB1307303, and the program of China Scholarships Council under Grant 202108310200. The authors would also like to thank Changlong Chen and Zhewen Zhang for constructive discussions on the project, and Jie Sun and Linrong Li for their contributions in experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Rehabilitation Engineering and Technology, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200093, China

    Xiaoming Wang, Qiaoling Meng & Hongliu Yu

  2. Department of Materials and Production, Aalborg University, 9220, Aalborg, Denmark

    Xiaoming Wang & Shaoping Bai

  3. Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Assistive Devices Institute of Rehabilitation Engineering and Technology, Shanghai, 200093, China

    Xiaoming Wang, Qiaoling Meng & Hongliu Yu

  4. Key Laboratory of Neural-Functional Information and Rehabilitation Engineering of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, Shanghai, 200093, China

    Xiaoming Wang, Qiaoling Meng & Hongliu Yu

  5. Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Shanghai, 201318, China

    Qingyun Meng

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  1. Xiaoming Wang
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Contributions

XW and QM conceived of the presented idea and developed the theory. XW carried out the implementation. XW, SB, and QM wrote the manusript with input from all authors. HY was in charge of overall direction and planning.

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Correspondence to Hongliu Yu.

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Wang, X., Meng, Q., Bai, S. et al. Hybrid Active–Passive Prosthetic Knee: A Gait Kinematics and Muscle Activity Comparison with Mechanical and Microprocessor-Controlled Passive Prostheses. J Bionic Eng 20, 119–135 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-022-00267-0

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