On the Adaptation of Pelvic Motion by Applying 3-dimensional Guidance Forces Using TPAD

Pelvic movement is important to human locomotion as the center of mass is located near the center of pelvis. Lateral pelvic motion plays a crucial role to shift the center of mass on the stance leg, while swinging the other leg and keeping the body balanced. In addition, vertical pelvic movement helps to reduce metabolic energy expenditure by exchanging potential and kinetic energy during the gait cycle. However, patient groups with cerebral palsy or stroke have excessive pelvic motion that leads to high energy expenditure. In addition, they have higher chances of falls as the center ofmass could deviate outside the base of support. In this paper, a novel control method is suggested using tethered pelvic assist device (TPAD) to teach subjects to walk with a specified target pelvic trajectory while walking on a treadmill. In this method, a force field is applied to the pelvis to guide it to move on a target trajectory and correctional forces are applied, if the pelvis motion has excessive deviations from the target trajectory. Three different experimentswith healthy subjects were conducted to teach them to walk on a new target pelvic trajectory with the presented control method. For all three experiments, the baseline trajectory of the pelvis was experimentally determined for each participating subject. To design a target pelvic trajectory which is different from the baseline, Experiment I scaled up the lateral component of the baseline pelvic trajectory, while Experiment II scaled down the lateral component of the baseline trajectory. For both Experiments I and II, the controller generated a 2-D force field in the transverse plane to provide the guidance force. In this paper, seven subjects were recruited for each experiment who walked on the treadmill with suggested control methods and visual feedback of their pelvic trajectory. The results show that the subjects were able to learn the target pelvic trajectory in each experiment and also retained the training effects after the completion of the experiment. In Experiment III, both lateral and vertical components of the pelvic trajectory were scaled down from the baseline trajectory. The force field was extended to three dimensions in order to correct the vertical pelvic movement as well. Three subgroups (force feedback alone, visual feedback alone, and both force and visual feedback) were recruited to understand the effects of force feedback and visual feedback alone to distinguish the results from Experiments I and II. The results showthat a trainingmethod that combines visual and force feedback is superior to the training methods with visual or force feedback alone. We believe that the present control strategy holds potential in training and correcting abnormal pelvic movements in different patient populations.