Abstract
We seek to improve balance recovery in amputee gait by taking advantage of the advent of active leg prostheses. Toward this goal, we use inspiration from biology to identify reflex-like control strategies that stabilize gait, refine these strategies in simulations of amputee locomotion, and evaluate the resulting controllers in experiments with human subjects wearing custom prototypes of active leg prostheses. Our results so far indicate that reflex-like control can improve balance recovery over existing control strategies used in active leg prostheses. However, further research on the hardware realization of the control is needed to more rigorously evaluate its potential benefit to amputee locomotion.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (award no. 1R01HD075492) and the National Science Foundation (award no. 1527140 and 0946825).
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Geyer, H., Thatte, N., Duan, H. (2017). Toward Balance Recovery with Active Leg Prostheses Using Neuromuscular Model Control. In: Ibáñez, J., González-Vargas, J., AzorÃn, J., Akay, M., Pons, J. (eds) Converging Clinical and Engineering Research on Neurorehabilitation II. Biosystems & Biorobotics, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46669-9_107
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46669-9_107
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