Balance Evaluation Based on Walking Experiments with Exoskeleton Interference

Abstract

The impairment of walking balance function seriously affects human health and will lead to a significantly increased risk of falling. It is important to assess and improve the walking balance of humans. However, existing evaluation methods for human walking balance are relatively subjective, and the selected metrics lack effectiveness and comprehensiveness. We present a method to construct a comprehensive evaluation index of human walking balance. We used it to generate personal and general indexes. We first pre-selected some preliminary metrics of walking balance based on theoretical analysis. Seven healthy subjects walked with exoskeleton interference on a treadmill at 1.25 m/s while their ground reaction force information and kinematic data were recorded. One subject with Charcot–Marie–Tooth walked at multiple speeds without the exoskeleton while the same data were collected. Then, we picked a number of effective evaluation metrics based on statistical analysis. We finally constructed the Walking Balance Index (WBI) by combining multiple metrics using principal component analysis. The WBI can distinguish walking balance among different subjects and gait conditions, which verifies the effectiveness of our method in evaluating human walking balance. This method can be used to evaluate and further improve the walking balance of humans in subsequent simulations and experiments.