Development and Preliminary Evaluation of a Bimodal Foot Prosthesis for Walking and Running.

People often alternate between bouts of walking and running, for instance, when adults participate in recreational activities. Transitioning between activities can be challenging for prosthesis users because existing prosthetic feet are not well-suited for both tasks. Meanwhile, switching between prostheses for different tasks is often impractical.

Characterizing the comfort limits of forces applied to the shoulders, thigh and shank to inform exosuit design.

Recent literature emphasizes the importance of comfort in the design of exosuits and other assistive devices that physically augment humans; however, there is little quantitative data to aid designers in determining what level of force makes users uncomfortable. To help close this knowledge gap, we characterized human comfort limits when applying forces to the shoulders, thigh and shank. Our objectives were: (i) characterize the comfort limits for multiple healthy participants, (ii) characterize comfort limits across days, and (iii) determine if comfort limits change when forces are applied at higher vs.

Hip circumduction is not a compensation for reduced knee flexion angle during gait.

It has long been held that hip abduction compensates for reduced swing-phase knee flexion angle, especially in those after stroke. However, there are other compensatory motions such as pelvic obliquity (hip hiking) that could also be used to facilitate foot clearance with greater energy efficiency. Our previous work suggested that hip abduction may not be a compensation for reduced knee flexion after stroke.