The development of motor based leg orthosis for leg exercise

This research focuses on the development of actuated leg orthosis device for leg exercise. The function of this machine is to swing up and down the shank of the paraplegic for exercise purposes. Leg exercise is very important to paraplegic to avoid the retraction of leg muscle, to avoid bone density deterioration as well as to improve blood circulation and nerve system. In this paper, the developed system is tested on 10 healthy subjects. The angle and time duration of the leg movement are recorded. The height and weight of the subjects are recorded to estimate the weight and height of their shank. Throughout the experiments, 3 different motor speeds are used there are low, medium and high. The DC motor with maximum current of 7 Ampere is used to drive the orthosis. Arduino microcontroller is used to control the movements. The result shows that subject with different weight and height will gives different effect the value of maximum leg angle and time duration to take for one complete cycle. From the results, the most suitable DC motor speed for this purpose is high speed-mode. This is because this speed is suitable for paraplegic weighting from low to high.