Study on the use of soft ankle-foot exoskeleton for alternative mechanical prophylaxis of deep vein thrombosis

Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) is a severe medical condition that can affect patients who are long-term bed-ridden, due to diseases such as stroke. Current prevention methods for DVT focus on either pharmacological prophylaxis or mechanical prophylaxis, where current mechanical prophylaxis systems that target prevention of DVT have limited success rates as patients are still susceptible to occurrences of DVT even with long-term usage of such systems. Therefore, this paper sought to present the design of a soft robotic exosock using soft pneumatic actuators to assist in passive ankle exercises for the prevention of DVT and to conduct a preliminary study on healthy human subjects to evaluate the effectiveness of this device in assisting ankle motion in terms of the range of motion assisted on the ankle. Our findings indicated that the exosock was able to provide assisted ankle plantarflexion-dorsiflexion to the subjects. Furthermore, our results showed that we were able to achieve an average of 16.4±1.3° of dorsiflexion from a resting position of the ankle with an average error of 2.7±1.4° in the real-time feedback of the ankle through a joint measurement unit. Therefore, the soft robotic exosock can potentially be used in the clinical rehabilitation of bedridden patients to prevent DVT while allowing for real-time feedback of the ankle off site.