“Emulating a Plastic Ankle-Foot Orthosis with a Hydraulic powered Ankle-Foot Orthosis”

Patients who are victims of cerebral palsy, live most of their life using Plastic Ankle-Foot Orthosis (PAFO) to support their ankles since they have weakened muscle coordination. Currently, it takes a patient multiple visits to a physician to get a PAFO with a correct stiffness prescribed. Therefore, a Hydraulic powered AFO was invented that can emulate the stiffness of a PAFO. The stiffness on the HAFO can be easily altered in comparison to a PAFO, which allows the physician to test a range of stiffness's on a patient all under one visit. I was involved in the data analysis portion of the project, which from here we realized what changes within the Controls System script for the HAFO needed to be made to successfully emulate a PAFO. Our end results showed that a PAFO stiffness was successfully emulated, the next steps to this project would be to use the HAFO for coming up with the best possible design for a PAFO with a specific application.