Understanding joint impedance with a knee exoskeleton

Testing knee perturbator. Photo source: ETH Zürich, RELab, Stefan Schneller

When designing exoskeletons for rehabilitation of patients after spinal cord injury or stroke, a constant concern is creating them to be as natural as possible to best enable user training to rebuild both muscles and neural networks.

Stefan Schrade from the Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, RELab, at ETH Zurich and NCCR Robotics, Switzerland, explains how the ETH knee perturbator is exploring the mechanical properties of the human knee and also helping understand how we recover from everyday stumbles.

And here’s a video of one of the experiments.

NCCR Robotics

NCCR Robotics