Brief biomechanical analysis on the walking of spinal cord injury patients with a lower limb exoskeleton robot

Abstract

This paper presents a brief biomechanical analysis on the walking behavior of spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. It is known that SCI patients who have serious injuries to their spines cannot walk, and hence, several walking assistance lower limb exoskeleton robots have been proposed whose assistance abilities are shown to be well customized. However, these robots are not yet fully helpful to all SCI patients for several reasons. To overcome these problems, an exact analysis and evaluation of the restored walking function while the exoskeleton is worn is important. In this work, walking behavior of SCI patients wearing the rehabilitation of brain injuries (ROBIN) lower-limb walking assistant exoskeleton was analyzed in comparison to that of normal unassisted walking. The analysis method and results presented herein can be used by other researchers to improve their robots.