Abstract
Repeated and intensive gait training can improve muscle strength and movement coordination of patients with neurological or orthopedic impairments. However, conventional physical therapy by a physiotherapist is laborious and expensive. Therefore, this therapy is not accessible for the majority of patients. This paper presents a six-bar linkage mechanism for human gait rehabilitation with a natural ankle trajectory. Firstly, a six-bar linkage mechanism is selected as the original mechanism to construct a gait rehabilitation device. Then the ankle trajectory is formulated as a function of the crank angle. And the rotation angle of the crank is set as a linear function of time. Therefore, constant speed motor is sufficient to control the mechanism. For the dimensional synthesis, the precise point distances of the gait trajectory and the coupler curve are set as objective functions, with the kinematic constraints including in the optimization procedure. To obtain the optimal structure design parameters, a cooperative dual particle swarm optimization algorithm is developed. The results show that the coupler curve matches well with the gait trajectory. The average distance between the 60 precision points is 3.5 mm.
Highlights
S TROKE is one of the leading causes of permanent disability worldwide, with nearly two thirds of the survivors suffering from paralysis or hemiplegia, and experiencing problems with daily activities such as walking [1], [2]
We observed that physical therapy can help people improve their basic activities of daily living after stroke [5], [6]
Two groups of particles are used to search, there is no information interaction between them [53]. He used damping factor and cooperation mechanism to improve the performance of particle swarm optimization algorithm [54]
Summary
S TROKE is one of the leading causes of permanent disability worldwide, with nearly two thirds of the survivors suffering from paralysis or hemiplegia, and experiencing problems with daily activities such as walking [1], [2]. In the rehabilitation robot system, end-effector gait trainers have attracted the attention of researchers [21], [22]. Mehdigholi [40] presented a method to optimization of watt’s six-bar linkage mechanism and used genetic algorithm for global search. Hu proposed an endocrine cooperative particle swarm optimization algorithm for routing recovery problem. Two groups of particles are used to search, there is no information interaction between them [53] He used damping factor and cooperation mechanism to improve the performance of particle swarm optimization algorithm [54]. This is beneficial to restrain the premature convergence of the algorithm These previous works provided a good foundation for finding the global minimum of linkage mechanism design equations. 3) The optimal design parameters of the structure proposed in this paper can be achieved by applying the CDPSO algorithm
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