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Session: Neuro-muscular – lower extremities 2
Session starts: Friday 25 January, 13:00
Presentation starts: 13:00
Room: Lecture room 536

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Victor Sluiter (University of Twente)
Cor Meijneke (TU Delft)
Gijs van Oort (University of Twente)

Abstract:
Current commercial exoskeletons are developed for people with a complete spinal cord injury (SCI). These devices consist of a rigid structure where motors provide walking trajectories, mostly actuating knee flexion and hip flexion. Although these devices can greatly help the people that need them, the concept behind these exoskeletons neglects the needs of the larger group of people with an incomplete SCI. This group still has partial motor control and / or sensory input. A full exoskeleton neglects the functions this group of patients still has. Within the EU Symbitron project an exoskeleton was designed to explore the options to restore gait for patients with a variety of lesion levels and medical scores. Our exoskeleton was designed with modularity as one of the key concepts to make it personizable. This enabled making an Active Knee Ankle Foot Orthosis (AKAFO) for those SCI patients that still have hip function, and making a full exoskeleton by adding a hip module. Modularity was also taken into consideration in the mechanical design, electronics design and low level controller to facilitate re-use and replacement of parts during development. The exoskeleton was built by a collaboration of the University of Twente and TU Delft, and the exoskeleton was tested by Fondazione Santa Lucia in Rome, a clinic for people with SCI. Innovative ideas were applied, such as a very compact series elastic drive design, a small form factor EtherCAT based motor driver with high sensor count, disturbance observers for the low level control and the use of neuromuscular controllers for high level control. Designing a modular exoskeleton over multiple locations and with a very high level of integration was a large challenge. This talk will describe the challenges we faced, the lessons we learned from it and our vision on exoskeleton design.