A front and side view of a volunteer wearing the Anklebot, which moves the ankle and records its stiffness.
(Credit: Hyunglae Lee/MIT)
The ankle is something of an anatomical puzzle.
“Imagine you have a collection of pebbles, and you wrap a whole bunch of elastic bands around them,” Neville Hogan, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT, said in a school news report. “That’s pretty much a description of what the ankle is. It’s nowhere near a simple joint from a kinematics standpoint.”
So Hogan teamed up with colleagues at MIT’s Newman Laboratory for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation to test Anklebot, a robot that uses electrodes to record the torque and angular displacement at the joint and calculate stiffness in various directions.
To do this, the bot is mounted to a knee brace that is in turn connected to a custom shoe, and Anklebot moves the person’s foot in a programmed trajectory to test the ankle’s normal range of motion.
In testing the bot on 10 healthy volunteers, the team learned that the motion of the ankle when moving side to side is actually independent of the motion when moving up and down. They also found that the ankle is weakest when turning inward, stronger when tilting from side to side, and strongest when simply moving up and dow… [Read more]
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