Engineering Platform and Experimental Protocol for Design and Evaluation of a Neurally-controlled Powered Transfemoral ProsthesisFan Zhang 1, Ming Liu 1, Stephen Harper 2,3, Michael Lee 3, He Huang 1
1Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, North Carolina State University & University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, 3Atlantic Prosthetics & Orthotics, LLC
Neural-machine interfaces (NMI) have been developed to identify the user's locomotion mode. These NMIs are potentially useful for neural control of powered artificial legs, but have not been fully demonstrated. This paper presented (1) our designed engineering platform for easy implementation and development of neural control for powered lower limb prostheses and (2) an experimental setup and protocol in a laboratory environment to evaluate neurally-controlled artificial legs on patients with lower limb amputations safely and efficiently.
