An improvement to the reciprocating gait orthosis for aiding paraplegic patients in walking

As the conventional reciprocating gait orthosis (RGO) has been deemed incapable of facilitating the patients’ passive movement with significant gait discrepancies and distortion, in addition to characteristics such as poor stability, and negligible knee joint rehabilitation, a power assisted reciprocating gait orthosis (PARGO) was designed. Drive devices were added to the hip and knee joints of the RGO. Through efficient implementation of structural components, the number of the required motors was reduced, therefore decreasing the weight of the orthosis. The PARGO knee joint’s structural principle was analyzed to characterize the effect of the PARGO’s single-axis knee joint design on wear comfort, thereby providing a basis for the wear of the PARGO. By analyzing the sagittal movement patterns of the hip and knee joints during normal human gait, kinematic analysis was carried out to obtain the input patterns of the PARGO hip and knee joint drive motors, enabling the patients to more accurately reproduce the normal gaits of hip and knee joints during the rehabilitation training with the aid of the PARGO, and the control process of the PARGO was studied. Finally, a prototype of the PARGO was developed, and experimentation was carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of the improved orthosis.