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Assistance Effect of an Evolved Heel-Raising Unit for Walking Disabilities

Authors:
Haruki Baba
Akimasa Suzuki
Yoshitoshi Murata

Keywords: walking disability, walking-assist unit, heel raising, walking posture, muscle power

Abstract:
Elderly people and people with diseases such as hemiplegia often have a walking disability, which increases their risk of falling and suffering injuries. In walking, the angular velocities when raising the heel and swinging the toe forward are lower for elderly people than for healthy individuals, because of their lower muscle power. We previously developed a heel-raising unit based on a spring, but that unit lacked a mechanism to release the spring at the optimal timing, as reported in the International Journal on Advances in Life Sciences in 2020. We have since developed an evolved heel-raising unit that works when the heel starts to rise after the whole shoe has contacted the floor. Experimental results demonstrate that the evolved unit's assistance effect is better than that of the previous simple unit. We also report a correlation between body weight and the optimal spring stiffness, and we show that the evolved unit does not affect the individual’s walking posture as much as the previous one did.

Pages: 20 to 25

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2022

Publication date: June 26, 2022

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4359

ISBN: 978-1-61208-984-3

Location: Porto, Portugal

Dates: from June 26, 2022 to June 30, 2022