Department of Mechanical Engineering, R&MM Research Group, and Flanders Make, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Pleinlaan 2, Brussels, 1050, Belgium.
J Neuroeng Rehabil. 2018 Oct 1;15(1):86. doi: 10.1186/s12984-018-0424-5.
In the last two decades, numerous powered ankle-foot orthoses have been developed. Despite similar designs and control strategies being shared by some of these devices, their performance in terms of achieving a comparable goal varies. It has been shown that the effect of powered ankle-foot orthoses on healthy users is altered by some factors of the testing protocol. This paper provides an overview of the effect of powered walking on healthy and weakened users. It identifies a set of key factors influencing the performance of powered ankle-foot orthoses, and it presents the effects of these factors on healthy subjects, highlighting the similarities and differences of the results obtained in different works. Furthermore, the outcomes of studies performed on elderly and impaired subjects walking with powered ankle-foot orthoses are compared, to outline the effects of powered walking on these users. This article shows that several factors mutually influence the performance of powered ankle-foot orthoses on their users and, for this reason, the determination of their effects on the user is not straightforward. One of the key factors is the adaptation of users to provided assistance. This factor is very important for the assessment of the effects of powered ankle-foot orthoses on users, however, it is not always reported by studies. Moreover, future works should report, together with the results, the list of influencing factors used in the protocol, to facilitate the comparison of the obtained results. This article also underlines the need for a standardized method to benchmark the actuators of powered ankle-foot orthoses, which would ease the comparison of results between the performed studies. In this paper, the lack of studies on elderly and impaired subjects is highlighted. The insufficiency of these studies makes it difficult to assess the effects of powered ankle-foot orthoses on these users.To summarize, this article provides a detailed overview of the work performed on powered ankle-foot orthoses, presenting and analyzing the results obtained, but also emphasizing topics on which more research is still required.
在过去的二十年中，已经开发出了许多电动踝足矫形器。尽管这些设备中的一些具有相似的设计和控制策略，但它们在实现可比目标方面的性能却有所不同。已经表明，电动踝足矫形器对健康使用者的影响会受到测试方案某些因素的影响。本文概述了电动步行对健康和虚弱使用者的影响。它确定了一组影响电动踝足矫形器性能的关键因素，并介绍了这些因素对健康受试者的影响，突出了在不同研究中获得的结果的相似性和差异性。此外，还比较了在使用电动踝足矫形器行走的老年人和受损受试者的研究结果，以说明电动行走对这些使用者的影响。本文表明，有几个因素相互影响电动踝足矫形器对其使用者的性能，因此，确定它们对使用者的影响并不简单。其中一个关键因素是使用者对提供的辅助的适应。对于评估电动踝足矫形器对使用者的影响，这一因素非常重要，但并非所有研究都报告了这一因素。此外，未来的工作应该在报告结果的同时，列出协议中使用的影响因素列表，以方便比较获得的结果。本文还强调了需要一种标准化的方法来对电动踝足矫形器的执行器进行基准测试，这将有助于比较所进行的研究之间的结果。本文还强调了在老年和受损受试者中缺乏研究。这些研究的不足使得难以评估电动踝足矫形器对这些使用者的影响。总之，本文详细概述了电动踝足矫形器的研究工作，介绍和分析了所获得的结果，但也强调了仍需要进一步研究的主题。
