Segmented Foot with Compliant Actuators and Its Applications to Lower-Limb Prostheses and Exoskeletons

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the functionality of the foot in human normal walking. Different from the existing methods that represent the foot as a single rigid bar, several multi-segmented foot models have been studied to evaluate the effects of the segmented foot structures on human walking for clinical applications [1], adolescent gaits [2] and pediatric gaits [3]. The results show that the segmented foot with a toe joint has several advantages compared to the rigid foot in: walking step, walking speed, range of joint angle, change in angular velocity and joint energy-output. In addition, biomechanical studies conducted on ten donated limbs [4] indicate that the human foot can not be considered as a single rigid body with no intrinsic motion.