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Pierre Cherelle 1 and Glenn Mathijssen 1 and Qining Wang 2 and Bram Vanderborght 1 and Dirk Lefeber 1
Academic Editor:Jan F. Veneman
1, R & MM, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
2, Intelligent Control Laboratory, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Received 19 May 2014; Accepted 17 June 2014; 16 July 2014
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
A transtibial (TT) amputation is often the treatment of choice for an unreconstructable or a functionally unsatisfactory limb. Possible reasons are severe trauma, peripheral vascular disease (PVD), tumors, infections, or congenital limb deficiency [1]. From the medical literature it is known that below-knee amputations are among the most frequently performed major limb removals and one of the oldest surgically performed procedures [2]. To replace the missing limb, many prosthetic feet have been developed in the past to, at least, restore basic functional mobility. As a matter of fact, the surgery must be performed well to ensure that the patient is able to wear a prosthesis comfortably. The selection of this prosthesis will be strongly dependent on the needs and abilities of the amputee. In general, the higher the level of a lower-limb amputation, the greater the energy expenditure that is required for walking [3]. And of course, the characteristics of the prosthesis itself directly influence the gait of the patient. Moreover, gait analyses have shown that, when walking, a sound ankle produces substantially more work than any other joint of the lower limbs [4, 5]. Winter [6] mentioned that the ankle joint muscles produce on average 540% more work than they store during walking. Therefore, the replacement of power generation at the ankle is one of the biggest challenges in replicating nonpathological gait by means of prosthetics [7].
Over the past decades, many researchers have studied human gait (pathological and nonpathological) in terms of kinematics, dynamics, and energy expenditure in view of developing new prosthetic devices that aim at raising the 3C-level (control, comfort, and cosmetics) of a patient by putting effort in mimicking the characteristics of an intact limb. Since...