Custom sizing of lower limb exoskeleton actuators using gait dynamic modelling of children with cerebral palsy

Abstract

The use of exoskeletons as an aid for people with musculoskeletal disorder is the subject to an increasing interest in the research community. These devices are expected to meet the specific needs of users, such as children with cerebral palsy (CP) who are considered a significant population in pediatric rehabilitation. Although these exoskeletons should be designed to ease the movement of people with physical shortcoming, their design is generally based on data obtained from healthy adults, which leads to oversized components that are inadequate to the targeted users. Consequently, the objective of this study is to custom-size the lower limb exoskeleton actuators based on dynamic modeling of the human body for children with CP on the basis of hip, knee, and ankle joint kinematics and dynamics of human body during gait. For this purpose, a multibody modeling of the human body of 3 typically developed children (TD) and 3 children with CP is used. The results show significant differences in gait patterns especially in knee and ankle with respectively 0.39 and −0.33 (Nm/kg) maximum torque differences between TD children and children with CP. This study provides the recommendations to support the design of actuators to normalize the movement of children with CP.

Keywords:

• Exoskeletons
• robotics
• actuator specifications
• gait analysis
• human joint
• dynamics
• kinematics
• multibody

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Pierre-Arbour Foundation for their support. Further, we are grateful to Annie Pouliot for her help during the trials.