Development of a body weight support system using pneumatic muscle actuators: Controlling and validation

Abstract

This study introduces the development of a new body weight support system using pneumatic actuators for gait training. The main scope of this work is to provide a new design, validation, and assessment for active body weight support systems to reproduce a subject’s normal walking behavior. Based on the assessments and its evaluations, the novel body weight support system using pneumatic muscle actuators shows many advantageous characteristics, such as simplicity, low cost, maintenance of a constant unloading force, and ease of control of the supported force. The capability of the novel body weight support system to generate unloading forces that track the center of pressure, because it switches from left to right and vice versa as the subject walks, is especially interesting.