CONSIDERATION OF ASSISTIVE DEVICES IN THE GAIT ANALYSIS OF SPINAL CORD-INJURED SUBJECTS

The gait of spinal cord injured subjects can be improved by means of properly designed active orthoses. Since the gait pattern varies greatly among different patients, the orthoses and their corresponding controllers must be carefully customized, and the joint motor torques obtained from inverse dynamic analysis constitute a useful input for this task. Nowadays, the analysis of standard gait by using motion capture data is a mature discipline. However, the problem becomes more complex in the case of spinal cord injured subjects wearing active orthoses: in addition to the presence of the orthoses, these patients always require the help of supplementary assistive devices, such as crutches, in order to stabilize their gait. In this work, the gait analysis of a subject walking with the aid of crutches and active knee ankle foot orthoses is performed, by introducing the assistive devices both at the experimental and computational levels. The required sensors and actuators are incorporated to the system, and the measurements are used to solve the inverse dynamics problem in order to calculate the joint motor torques produced by the subject during gait.