Biomechanical kinetic consideration of the unrestrained trans-femoral prosthetic gait using energy consumption

Recently, trans-femoral amputees must regain moving pattern by refined rehabilitation program using loads applied on the lower limb. On the other hand, understanding those loads and kinetic variables is essential for gait analysis based on the biomechanical consideration of trans-femoral amputees. However, conventional gait measurement systems cannot measure long continuous walking motions. In this paper, ground reaction forces, joint moments, joint powers and energy consumption applied on trans-femoral amputee are calculated by the prosthetic gait motion analysis system using mobile force plate and attitude sensor for the unrestrained gait measurement. As a result of the experiments, the patterns of joint moments and joint powers in the sagittal plane and energy consumption by them are obtained as the remarkably different feature quantities among the five activities. Finally, the effectiveness of the unrestrained prosthetic gait measurement to analyze human biomechanics during gait and its quantitative evaluation based on those data is validated.