Improving Walking After a Lower Limb Injury Using a Custom Motorized Orthosis

The purpose of this research study is to assess the ease, convenience, and efficacy of walking when using a motor powered ankle foot orthosis (AFO) brace, in adults who have had a lower limb injury.

The long-term goal of this project is to improve the outcomes of robot-assisted exercise interventions for patients with reconstructed lower limb following high-energy lower extremity traumas using novel machine learning methods to enable individualized ankle foot orthosis (AFO) designs and self-adaptive AFO assistance. The main hypothesis predicts greater comfort and lower pain levels when using the new AFO as well as improvements in gait mechanics, which will outperform those induced by patients' daily-use AFOs. The main goal is this adaptive assistance will encourage the wearer's active engagement in RAGT thereby promoting patient self-efficacy/satisfaction and leading to improvements in ambulation after a 6-week rehabilitation program.