WheelWalker: a foot-wheel driving exoskeleton for the alternate walk of paraplegic patients

State Key Laboratory of Tribology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Abstract

Upright walk is the fundamental need of paraplegic patients. In this study, we proposed a novel lower-limb exoskeleton for assisting the patients to walk alternately and further improve their engagement in the rehabilitation training. The exoskeleton was driven by a hub motor which was mounted under the foot, and a pair of custom-made crutch with wireless controller was used to control the walking condition of exoskeleton and maintain balance. This paper mainly introduced the general designing concept and detailed specifications of each modules of the exoskeleton. A pilot using experiment was performed on two healthy subjects to qualitatively analyse the capability of this exoskeleton when adopting different gaits. The results showed that the subjects with different body characteristics could complete continued walk by wearing this exoskeleton either in a three-point gait mode or four-point gait mode.