Design, development, and calibration of bipedal force-plate for post prosthesis gait rehabilitation

Abstract

There is a large demand for gait balancing devices for the above knee and below knee amputees after the installation of prostheses globally due to rehabilitation problems associated with prosthesis they occupied. Conventionally various methods used for this purpose those not affordable and not accessible easily and are not feasible generally as they need a lot of space and a well-qualified trainer which is not possible. So for it is required to design and develop an in-house transient force sensing device for lower limb amputees to get balanced in their gait cycle after wearing a prosthesis. Objectives of this research is to design and develop an affordable, accessible, easy to adopt and in-house force-plate for lower limb amputees to balance in gait cycle in four successive stride length after wearing prosthesis and improve their center of pressure line and to get quality of life. A force plate is designed via cad software and fabricated by the author. In this work, researchers passed through all the faces of such as design, modeling, fabrication electronic circuitry, interfacing, programming, and calibration. With the help of this force plate, an amputee can improve their gait cycle in five stride lengths one by one. Finally we have been designed and fabricated an in-house force-plate for lower limb amputees to get balanced in their gait cycle after wearing a prosthesis. A maximum deviation of 0.4 N was found from the tare value after experiments. From this limited study we conclude that the plate designed and fabricate can be used to improve the amputee's gait cycle and it has the potential to get easy access, affordability, less space occupying features.