Passive Swing Assistive Exoskeletons for Motor-Incomplete Spinal Cord Injury Patients

In this paper, we present a passive device for swing assistance of motor-incomplete spinal cord injury patients. This device is aimed at reducing the physical demands on the therapists during treadmill training. We model the human leg as two links and a point foot mass, with a moving trunk. We employ passive elements in the design which get charged by the treadmill. Using the system dynamics, we optimize the design parameters to obtain a feasible swing motion of the leg. An exoskeleton was constructed based on these design parameters and tests were performed on a healthy subject at different treadmill speeds.