Effects of overground gait training assisted by a wearable exoskeleton in patients with Parkinson's disease.

Background: In the recent past, wearable devices have been used for gait rehabilitation in patients with Parkinson's disease. The objective of this paper is to analyze the outcome of a wearable hip orthosis whose assistance adapts in real time to the patient's gait kinematics via adaptive oscillators. In particular, this study focuses on a metric characterizing natural gait variability, i.

On the Usability of Polymer-Based Artificial Tendons for Elastic Energy Storage in Active Ankle Prostheses.

In the recent past, the development of lower-limb prostheses has taken a new turn with the emergence of active systems. However, their intrinsic wearable nature induces strict requirements regarding weight and encumbrance. In order to reduce the load - and thus the bulkiness - of their active part, several prototypes leverage the concept of compliant actuation, consisting in including an elastic element in parallel and/or in series with the actuator.

Adaptive walking assistance does not impact long-range stride-to-stride autocorrelations in healthy people.

Many studies have demonstrated in the past that the level of long-range autocorrelations in series of stride durations, characterizing natural gait variability, is impacted by external constraints, such as treadmill or metronome, or by pathologies, such as Parkinson's or Huntington's disease. Nevertheless, no one has analyzed the effects on this metric of a gait constrained by a robot-mediated walking assistance, which intrinsically tends to normalize the gait pattern. This paper focuses on the influence of a wearable active pelvis orthosis on the level of long-range autocorrelations in series of stride durations.

Numerical assessment of wake-based estimation of instantaneous lift in flapping flight of large birds.

Experimental characterization of bird flight without instrumenting the animal requires measuring the flow behind the bird in a wind tunnel. Models are used to link the measured velocities to the corresponding aerodynamic forces. Widely-used models can, however, prove inconsistent when evaluating the instantaneous lift.

Model of gait control in Parkinson's disease and prediction of robotic assistance.

Gait variability of healthy adults exhibits Long-Range Autocorrelations (LRA), meaning that the stride interval at any time statistically depends on previous gait cycles; and this dependency spans over several hundreds of strides. Previous works have shown that this property is altered in patients with Parkinson's disease, such that their gait pattern corresponds to a more random process. Here, we adapted a model of gait control to interpret the reduction in LRA that characterized patients in a computational framework.