Development of active orthosis for lumbago relief-improvement of pneumatic textile actuator for orthosis

Abstract

It is important to develop the orthosis which improves the Quality of Life (QOL) and maintains health conditions. As one of the treatment methods done to lumbago(low back pain), the waist fixation method with the spinal brace or the orthosis is prescribed. A waist active orthosis implemented with pneumatic flexible actuators have been developed. However, several problems of the previous actuator were that the strain and the generated force were small for the orthosis.Thus, this paper proposesthe improved actuator for the orthosis. Theimproved actuator is modeled and the reliability of static and dynamic model is validated through experiment. As a result, it was confirmed that the improved actuator had the strain of 2 times and the generated force of 1.3 times, in comparison with the previous actuator. And the dynamic model including volume of actuatorcould be represented by a second-order form with a dead time.