title: A self-aligning knee joint for walking assistance devices.
abstract: This paper presents a novel self-aligning knee mechanism for walking assistance devices for the elderly to provide physical gait assistance. Self-aligning knee joints can assist in flexion/extension motions of the knee joint and compensate the knee's transitional movements in the sagittal plane. In order to compensate the center of rotation, which moves with the flexion/extension motion of the human knee joint, a self-aligning knee joint is proposed that adds redundant degrees of freedom (i.e., 2-DoF) to the 1-DoF revolute joint. The key idea of the proposed mechanism is to decouple joint rotations and translations for use in lower-extremity wearable devices. This paper describes the mechanical design of this self-aligning knee mechanism and its implementation on a wearable robot and in preliminary experiments. The performance of the proposed mechanism is verified by simulations and experiments.
authors.lastname: Byungjune Choi
authors.lastname: Younbaek Lee
authors.lastname: Jeonghun Kim
authors.lastname: Minhyung Lee
authors.lastname: Jongwon Lee
authors.lastname: Se-Gon Roh
authors.lastname: Hyundo Choi
authors.lastname: Yong-Jae Kim
authors.lastname: Jung-Yun Choi
mesh_terms: D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D005684:Gait; D006801:Humans; D007717:Knee; D007719:Knee Joint; D009989:Orthotic Devices; D016138:Walking