Towards intelligent lower limb wearable robots: Challenges and perspectives - State of the art

Recent technological advances made necessary the use of the robots in various types of applications. Currently, the traditional robot-like scenarios dedicated to industrial applications with repetitive tasks, were replaced by applications which require human interaction. The main field of such applications concerns the rehabilitation and aid of elderly persons. In this study, we present a state-of-the-art of the main research advances in lower limbs actuated orthosis/wearable robots in the literature. This will include a review on researches covering full limb exoskeletons, lower limb exoskeletons and particularly the knee joint orthosis. Rehabilitation using treadmill based device and use of Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) are also investigated. We discuss finally the challenges not yet solved such as issues related to portability, energy consumption, social constraints and high costs of these devices.