Development and Applicability of a Cable-driven Wearable Adaptive Rehabilitation Suit (WeARS)

Abstract

Walking is one of the most relevant tasks that a person performs in his daily routine, which requires actuation and coordination of both inter and intra limb parameters of the lower extremity to adjust to the changing conditions of the environment like an unexpected perturbation or a change in terrain. Incidentally, with aging or due to an occurrence of a neuro-musculoskeletal disorder, human performance while walking degrades significantly. A major reason for the abnormal performance has been attributed to the observance of variability in the order and timing of muscle contraction in these individuals. In this work, we develop a Wearable Adaptive Rehabilitation Suit (WeARS) for lower extremity that uses externally actuated cables to resemble the role of agonist and antagonist muscles as in a biological system. WeARS also uses a subject-specific control strategy that is adaptive to the subject’s gait. The focus of the current pilot study is to use WeARS in applying resistive forces on the hip joint to study various gait abnormalities and to develop subject-specific gait rehabilitation paradigms.