Design, control and evaluation of a low-cost active orthosis for the gait of spinal cord injured subjects

Robotic gait training after spinal cord injury is of high priority to maximize independence and improve the living conditions of the patients. Current rehabilitation robots are expensive and heavy, and are generally found only in the clinical environment. To overcome these issues, we present the design of a low-cost, low-weight and personalized robotic orthosis for incomplete spinal cord injured subjects. The paper also presents a preliminary experimental evaluation of the assistive device on one subject with spinal cord injury that can control hip flexion to a certain extent, but lacks control of knee and ankle muscles. Results show that gait velocity, stride length and cadence of walking increased (24,11%, 7,41% and 15,56%, respectively) when wearing active orthoses compared to the case when the subject used the usual passive orthoses.