Abstract
In this article, we present the ascending and descending gait cycle of spinal cord injured(SCI) patients by observing healthy people’s lower limb activities, and the algorithm to estimate human’s motion intention and descending for spinal cord injured patients. Previous studies focused on sit-to-stand and plane walking only. This article tried to assist spinal cord injured patients walking on ramps or stairs with a powered lower limb orthosis and a pair of forearm crutches, the system is designed to utilize three types of signals, one comes from the accelerometer to detect user’s upper body gesture, another comes from the flexi-pressure sensors which are placed under the crutches and a pair of shoes to measure weight-shift of the body, and a gyroscope is placed on the top of the crutch handle to detect the height of the terrain in front of the user. The collected signals are sent to several trained artificial neural network to classify user’s motion and trigger the corresponding gait trajectory. It is expected that spinal cord injured patients could walk on ramps or stairs with the proposed algorithm and incorporated gait trajectory as they wear a powered lower limb orthosis.