A new powered orthosis with hip and ankle linkage for paraplegics walking

Several types of hip-knee-ankle-foot orthotic systems have been proposed for paraplegic walking during these decades. Hip and ankle linked orthosis (HALO) is compact one in those orthoses, which seeks to achieve a smoother-movement and user-easiness on its don/doff in paraplegic walking. The idea of HALO is to link two ankle joints with medial single joint via wires so that the orthosis keeps both feet always parallel to the floor while walking and assist the swinging of the leg. So as to reduce the consumption energy of HALO walking, we have introduced two actuators to control the ankle-joints angles in this paper. The actuators placed at hip joint in HALO allow the orthosis to have more degree-of-freedom and are able to provide a propulsive force the coupled user-orthosis system. The results of preliminary experiments with normal subjects show that the users can walk smoother and the proposed orthotic system will be able to reduce the users' consumption energy while walking.