A self-aligning knee joint for walking assistance devices.

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.

Flexible sliding frame for gait enhancing mechatronic system (GEMS).

This paper presents a novel flexible sliding thigh frame for a gait enhancing mechatronic system. With its two-layered unique structure, the frame is flexible in certain locations and directions, and stiff at certain other locations, so that it can fît well to the wearer's thigh and transmit the assisting torque without joint loading. The paper describes the basic mechanics of this 3D flexible frame and its stiffness characteristics. We implemented the 3D flexible frame on a gait enhancing mechatronic system and conducted experiments. The performance of the proposed mechanism is verified by simulation and experiments.