The Effectiveness of Body Weight Transfer in FES-Assisted Walking with Wheel Walker

This paper describes the development of a fuzzy control scheme for functional electrical stimulation, (FES)-assisted paraplegic walking with wheel walker. The simulation in this study starts with a model of humanoid with wheel walker using the Visual Nastran (Vn4D) dynamic simulation software. The humanoid model is designed based on anthropometric data. Two stimulated muscle models, quadriceps and hamstrings, are developed for knee extension and flexion. A fuzzy logic controller is designed to control the walking gait. It is designed in Matlab/Simulink to regulate the muscle stimulation pulse width required to drive FES-assisted walking gait. The body weight transfer technique is introduced to improve the paraplegic walking performance. The results show that body weight transfer can reduce torque required for FES-assisted paraplegic walking with wheel walker.