Development of an ankle-foot orthosis with a pneumatic passive element

Abstract

This paper presents a new ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) for hemiplegic patients. The proposed AFO has a pneumatic passive element with a rotation axis at the ankle joint. The ankle-joint constraint force can be adjusted according to the subject's gait phase. We confirmed that adjusting of the pneumatic pressure in the proposed pneumatic passive element enables the device to duplicate the performance of many conventional AFOs