This study introduces the development of a new body weight support system using pneumatic actuators for gait training. The main scope of this work is to provide a new design, validation, and assessment for active body weight support systems to reproduce a subject's normal walking behavior. Based on the assessments and its evaluations, the novel body weight support system using pneumatic muscle actuators shows many advantageous characteristics, such as simplicity, low cost, maintenance of a constant unloading force, and ease of control of the supported force. The capability of the novel body weight support system to generate unloading forces that track the center of pressure, because it switches from left to right and vice versa as the subject walks, is especially interesting.

In recent years, the Body Weight Support system has been considered to be an indispensable component in gait training systems, which be used to improve the ability to walk of hemiplegic, stroke, and spinal cord injury patients. Previous studies investigated the influence of the Body Weight Support system on gait parameters were based on the implementation with healthy subjects or patients with high assistance. Consequently, the influences of the Body Weight Support systems on gait rehabilitation in clinical practice are still unclear and need further investigation. In this study, we investigated the effects of the two Body Weight Support systems, the active body weight support system and the Counter Weight system, on an abnormal gait, which was generated by restriction of the right knee joint and 3 kg-weight on the right ankle joint. Both Body Weight Support systems improve the gait parameters of the abnormal gait such as the center of mass, the center of pressure, margin of stability, and step parameters. The active Body Weight Support system with the unloading force modulation showed more advanced and better behavior in comparison with the Counter Weight system. The results suggested the applicability of two Body Weight Support systems in clinical practice as a recovered gait intervention.

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Abstract-In recent years, Treadmill Body Weight Support System has been developed and proved the improvement for patients who recover from Spinal Cord Injury. Passive and dynamic systems were shown their capacities to maintain unloading force in the vertical direction, however, there are no system considered that track the moving of the Center of Pressure trajectory during gait training. Our hypothesis is that tracking Center of Pressure trajectory, during gait training, could be more effective than the common system. This paper proposed a new active Body Weight Support system using Pneumatic Artificial Muscle actuators. An active model of new Body Weight Support system with the tracking model of the human center of pressure was developed. The validation tests experiments were implemented with three levels of unloading force 30%, 50% and 70% using new Body Weight Support system and counter weight system for comparison. The speed of the treadmill is set, for all the experiments at 2 km/h. Center of pressure trajectories are recorded for a normal random walk, for the counter weight system and for the Body Weight Support systems. The results showed that the center of pressure trajectory using active system was much fitter with center of pressure pattern of normal gait than counter weight system.

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