Human-Inspired Robotic Exoskeleton for Post-Stroke Gait Rehabilitation

Abstract

Stroke is one of the leading causes of physical disability and many suffer paralysis to their limbs. The rehabilitation to recover the function of gait often takes time because the current rehabilitation technique used is labour intensive and time consuming for the therapists and difficult to perform it effectively. In order to improve the gait rehabilitation process, robot assisted gait rehabilitation has gained much interest over the past years. The contributions of this research are the development of new robotic exoskeleton device designed to be lightweight, comfortable, and safe to use for gait rehabilitation for stroke patients, which were lacking in the existing devices. Another contribution is the establishment of new manufacturing technique that allows custom exoskeleton components for each individual patient. Finally, the development of advanced model-based Feedforward (FF) controller that achieves fast and accurate tracking performance is explored in this chapter.