Title:
Biomechanical Effects of Powered Prothesis and Passive Prosthesis

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Zhou, Sixu
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Young, Aaron
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Abstract
The population of individuals with transfemoral amputation is expected to grow rapidly over the next few decades. The impact of mobility due to lower extremity loss worsens the quality of life of these individuals. One of the most common solutions is to use a lower extremity prosthesis to rehabilitate the locomotion tasks of normal daily living. The first section presented in this thesis study is to evaluate the balance of lower limb prosthesis users on beam walking. Meanwhile, inspired by the biomechanical data of able body locomotion, no state-of-the-art control strategy has been discovered to adapt biomechanics when individuals with a transfemoral amputation walk in different slope contexts while wearing an active knee and ankle prosthesis. Thus, the second section presented in this thesis study is to design a smart midlevel controller to produce the kinematics and kinetics profiles of the active prosthesis users with scaling assistance. All studies used biomechanical information as outcome measures. Two different types of experiments were performed: one with narrowing beam walking test on three MPKs including Cleg 4.0, RheoKnee and PowerKnee, and another slope walking test on knee-and-ankle active prosthesis. From the balance evaluation experiment, PowerKnee and RheoKnee both exhibited similar performance on the distance traveled on the beam. There is a distinct difference in WBAM regulation as the contact surface area is reduced as the beam becomes narrower. WBAM of the last gait cycle which represented as the falling event shows a higher frontal peak-to-peak values and might be affected by the foot placement. The quantified value when the fall occurs cannot be determined due to limits of testings. The smart controller takes several iterations to improve the performance of the biome chanical outcomes. Development tools are built and presented to help users better adapt to the device. A concluding able body test is performed to validate knee scaling control, but is not fully validated in application to individuals with transfemoral amputation.
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2022-05-03
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