Design and Development of a Lower Limb Exoskeleton for Rehabilitation
This proposed project is a lower limb exoskeleton that is design and develop for rehabilitation while the safety rules and regulation is kept in mind. The developed exoskeleton is made up of purely rehabilitation kits such hip and knee orthoses kits so th
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INTRODUCTION In everyday routines lower limb plays an important role in day to day physical activities such as flexion and extension, walking motion, sitting and standing position where the joints have significant role. In today’s busy and fast life and increasing of senior citizens, people of different age group have numerous amount of paraplegic attack, muscles problem that most of them have less mobility of the leg and rest have certain muscular injuries caused by traffic accidents where it is difficult to move the lower limb [1]. Clinical field of rehab make use of rehabilitation exoskeleton suit which happens to be a special robotic suit that is used to minimize conventional rehabilitation training program and allows physicians to take break from the highly stressful training program exercises. Exoskeleton suits could in fact be activated with the use of patient`s movement awareness, enhances the overall self-confidence that patient possesses in relation to rehabilitation by offering them a relaxed and convenient to interact human to machine interface [2]. The exoskeleton suit will be able to assist them in being self-reliant and also fills them with confidence to reintegrate into society. Pervious study explains it is necessary to understand the function of the exoskeleton, basically exoskeleton is the wearable prototype which has an ergonomic design mechanism that will help the users in movement of limbs [4]. There are different kinds of rehabilitation exoskeleton currently in the market for the rehab requirements [1], [2] and [3].
The development of this project is to aid the rehabilitation process to revive the lower limb by way of flexion and extension by utilizing the Arduino microcontroller to receive feed-back as well as to control electric motors by using inertial measurement unit (IMU) and electromyography (EMG) sensor that is competent at assessing the electrical impulses produced during the muscles activities stated more precisely the flexion and extension of the lower limb. A graphical user interface (GUI) is put together based on the information collected from the EMG sensor to give a real-time biofeedback simulation of a performed flexion and extension exercise. Furthermore the proposed exoskeleton is to be designs in such a way that it can fit anyone without any assistance of the specialist’s physiotherapist which makes it portable and adjustable as well. The flexibility of the leg exoskeletons have number of degree of freedom (DOF), while in this project it makes easy to the rehabilitator by having only 2 DOF that is flexion and extension of the lower limb exoskeleton which is friendly to the patients.
II. METHODOLOGY The methodology of developing the lower limb exoskeleton is shown in the block diagram in figure 1, where the steps shows that how the lower limb leg can be actuate by DC motor using the signal form the from IMU and EMG muscles sensors. Hence to do the rehabilitation exercise of flexion and extension is shown in the GUI.
Fig. 1 System Block Diagram
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