Design and Experimental Verification of a Parallel Hip Exoskeleton System for Full-Gait-Cycle Rehabilitation

Abstract

Rehabilitation with exoskeletons after hip joint replacement is a tendency to achieve efficient recovery of people to rebuild their human motor functions. However, kinematic mismatch between the kinematic and biological hip is a problem in most existing exoskeletons that can cause additional stress in the hip. To avoid secondary damage, the misalignment between the mechanical and biological hip joint of an exoskeleton must be compensated. This paper introduces a novel hip exoskeleton system based on parallel structure. The exoskeleton can inherently address the kinematic mismatch by introducing additional kinematic redundancy, while requiring no additional kinematic components and volumes. To achieve bidirectional full-gait-cycle walking assistance, a remote actuation system is designed for power delivery. A control scheme is designed to reject disturbances caused by gait dynamics during walking exercises. Human testing was carried out to evaluate the performance of the system. The results show that the exoskeleton has good human-machine kinematic compatibility and can achieve promising force tracking in the presence of gait dynamics.

Multidisciplinary Rehabilitation after Hyaluronic Acid Injections for Elderly with Knee, Hip, Shoulder, and Temporomandibular Joint Osteoarthritis

“…Altogether, these findings underline the importance of a multicomponent rehabilitation approach leading to overcoming pain barriers to therapeutic exercise and providing synergic effects in physical functioning and physical performance improvements. In this context, attention should be paid to the sustainability of a multicomponent approach and digital technologies might be considered a promising tool to reduce the expenditure and improve the tailored management of patients with hip OA [75,76].…”