GaitEnable: An omnidirectional robotic system for gait rehabilitation

This paper introduces GaitEnable, a robotic gait trainer composed of an actuated omnidirectional mobile base, a passive body weight support (BWS) system, and a reactive control system that can initiate, sustain, stabilize or perturb a user´s gait. The device is designed to provide minimal constraints to the user´s natural motion, and its actuated mobile base can move cooperatively with the user in any direction. Data from preliminary experiments performed by a healthy male subject confirm that the reactive control system can compensate for the device´s inertial effects and that the device´s omnidirectional mobile base reduces pelvis and torso motion constraints. The results also demonstrate that GaitEnable can easily be programmed to simulate different types of behaviours or motion constraints.