Foot contact forces can be used to personalize a wearable robot during human walking.

ABSTRACT: Individuals with below-knee amputation (BKA) experience increased physical effort when walking, and the use of a robotic ankle-foot prosthesis (AFP) can reduce such effort. The walking effort could be further reduced if the robot is personalized to the wearer using human-in-the-loop (HIL) optimization of wearable robot parameters. The conventional physiological measurement, however, requires a long estimation time, hampering real-time optimization due to the limited experimental time budget. This study hypothesized that a function of foot contact force, the symmetric foot force-time integral (FFTI), could be used as a cost function for HIL optimization to rapidly estimate the physical effort of walking. We found that the new cost function presents a reasonable correlation with measured met

SUBMITTER: Jacobson M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9243054 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature