Non-contact capacitance sensing for continuous locomotion mode recognition: Design specifications and experiments with an amputee

Locomotion mode recognition plays an important role in the control of powered lower-limb prostheses. In this paper, we present a non-contact capacitance sensing system (C-Sens) to measure the interfacial signals between the residual limb and the prosthetic socket. The system includes sensing front-ends, a sensing circuit, a control circuit and foot pressure insoles. In the proposed system, the electrodes are fixed on the inner surface of the socket, which couple with the human body forming capacitors. The foot pressure insoles are built for detecting gait phases. The data sequence is controlled by the control circuit. To evaluate the capacitance sensing system, experiments with a transtibial amputee are carried out and seven kinds of locomotion modes are recorded. With the continuous phase dependent classification method and the quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) classifier, the average recognition accuracies are 93.8% and 95.0% for the stance phase and the swing phase respectively. The results show the potential of the proposed system for the control of powered lower-limb prostheses.