A novel contractile vacuum actuator and multi-actuator development for knee extension assist

Rehabilitation of the Human Bone-Muscle System

“…The studies on the evaluation of TVC are purely descriptive, they do not involve any intervention or program of work with the patients. Only two experimental studies used control groups and assessed walking before and after an intervention [81][82][83].…”

“…where the common area is the integral of the sum of the antagonistic and agonistic EMG amplitudes and the total area is the total number of data points; (ii) the second method has been proposed by [81]:…”

“…For example, walking on a floor surface rather than on a treadmill, walking at different speeds and for longer distances or times increase TVC recruitment and variability between subjects [87,88]. TVC during walking has been studied in patients with stroke [54,81,[89][90][91][92][93], and in the case of CP patients [77,81,[94][95][96][97][98][99].…”

“…The method of Hesse et al [81] (2) becomes: Finally, the method of Falconer and Winter [85] (3) can be reformulated as follows:…”

“…An airtight pouch made of a TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) coated fabric was interfaced with a helical spring skeleton. Hence, the overall weight was reduced down to 2 g, and a high-force-weight ratio (230) was obtained [81]. More recently, they proposed a Thin-walled Vacuum Actuator (ThinVAc) and developed a multi-filament actuator, allowing simple scaling of actuation force while retaining the ability to actuator during deformation [78].…”