Body Mass Index as a Parameter in a Motor Adaptation Process

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how healthy, neurologically intact humans adapt their walking patterns to a powered compliant knee exoskeleton KNEXO that imply altered, less flexion gait pattern assistance during treadmill exercise. The experimental data of fifteen healthy subjects walked while wearing a pneumatically powered knee exoskeleton KNEXO on the treadmill was analyzed. We hypothesized that initially the gait kinematics of subject would be distorted by the added exoskeleton force. The muscle activity would be increased because of unusual gait pattern imposed by robot, but with practice knee torques became lower and also muscle activity decrease. Although KNEXO design includes safe compliance pneumatic actuators - Pleated Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PPAM) we imply to obtain the Low Compliance (LC) and High Compliance (HC) behavior of the robot by adjusting the PID gains of the PSMC controller. In order to improve motor learning process the human-robot interaction (HRI) aspects of fifteen healthy subjects were observed and analyzed in different control setups of the robot.