Development of leg support system Manipuleg for hemiplegia based on manual control

Abstract

A wearable leg support system for hemiplegia has been proposed in this paper. Power assist suits, which are studied by many researchers lately, are not applicable to those people with lower limb paralysis caused by spinal cord injury or stroke. We have developed a wearable leg support system, Manipuleg-2, that has actuators at hip, knee, and ankle, and has a special control lever mounted on the unaffected shoulder. The postures of user's arm and wrist are detected by the lever with 3 DOF, and are transformed to the actuator joint angles for manipulation of the exoskeleton leg. Walking experiments have been conducted for an able-bodied subject with the developed system on a level floor and a certain uneven floor, and the results show that the subject has mastered how to manipulate the control lever to walk properly.

Keywords

• wearable exoskeleton robot
• hemiplegia
• manual control