Real-time Gait Mode Intent Recognition of a Powered Knee and Ankle Prosthesis for Standing and Walking

This paper describes a real-time gait mode intent recognition approach for the supervisory control of a powered transfemoral prosthesis. The proposed approach infers user intent by recognizing patterns in the prosthesis sensor's signals in real-time, eliminating the need for sound-side instrumentation and allowing fast mode switching. Simple time based features extracted from frames of prosthesis signals are reduced to lower dimensions. Gaussian Mixture Models are trained using an experimental database for gait mode classification. A voting scheme is applied as a post-processing step to increase the robustness of decision making. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown via gait experiments on a treadmill with a healthy subject using an able bodied adapter.