Initial System Evaluation of an Overground Rehabilitation Gait Training Robot (NaTUre-gaits)

Abstract

For decades, robotic devices have been suggested to enhance motor recovery by replicating clinical manual-assisted training. This paper presents an overground gait rehabilitation robot, which consists of a pair of robotic orthoses, the connected pelvic arm in parallel and a mounted mobile platform. The overground walking incorporates pelvic control together with active joints on the lower limb. As a preliminary evaluation, system trials have been conducted on healthy subjects and a spinal cord injury (SCI) subject, respectively. Electromyography signals were recorded from muscles of the lower limb for each subject. Three experiments were carried out: (i) health volunteers walking at self-preferred walking speed, (ii) a SCI subject walking with the help of three helpers and (iii) the same SCI subject walking with the assistance provided by the gait device. In the experiment, the muscle activation of overground walking was compared between the manual-assisted and robotic-assisted methods. The initial results show that the performance of the device can provide impact-less overground walking and it is comparable to the performance obtained by manual assistance in gait rehabilitation training.