A robotic exoskeleton for overground gait rehabilitation

Every year, stroke significantly affects thousands of individuals who require rehabilitation to regain lost movements and return to a normal life. Exoskeletons are becoming a very powerful tool to help therapists in this rehabilitation process. This work presents a robotic exoskeleton designed to assist overground gait training for stroke survivors with deficits in gait coordination despite conventional rehabilitation. The device is a bilateral exoskeleton with six degrees of freedom and is designed to implement two control strategies. An adaptive trajectory control has been developed to guide the patient´s limb within a desired path, allowing a deviation based on torque of interaction between the user and the exoskeleton. An admittance control strategy allows the robotic platform to capture the user´s movements during assistive training and to replicate it during active training. Experimental results show that the exoskeleton can adapt a pre-recorded gait pattern for the gait pattern of a specific user. Future investigations will evaluate the device in the rehabilitation of patients who have suffered from stroke and make a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of different robotic therapies.