SUMMARY

Transfemoral amputee population is expected to grow rapidly in next few decades. Mobility loss worsen the quality of life of these individuals. One of the most common solutions is to use a lower limb prosthesis to rehabilitate the normal daily life locomotion tasks. There is no previous studies on the transfemoral individuals balance control of wearing different MPKs on the narrowing beam walking test. The first section presented in this thesis study is to address this research gap. Meanwhile, inspired by the able body locotion biomechanical data, there is no state-of-art control strategy discovered to adapt the biomechanics when transfemoral individuals walks on different contexts of slopes wearing active knee-and-ankle prosthesis. Thus, the second section presented in this thesis study is to design a smart mid-level control to yield the kinematics and kinetics profiles of the active prosthesis users with scaling assistance. All studies used the biomechanical information as the outcome measures.

Two different types of experiments were performed: one with narrowing beam walking test on three MPKs, and another slope walking test on knee-and-ankle active prosthesis. From the balance evaluation experiment, Cleg performs the worst regulation of WBAM among all MPKs while PowerKnee and RheoKnee both exhibited incomparable performance on the distance traveled on the beam. There is a distinct difference in WBAM regulation as the contact surface area reduced. WBAM of last gait cycle which represented as the falling event shows a higher frontal peak-to-peak values might be affected by the foot placement. The quantified value when fall occurs cannot be determined due to limits of testings.

The smart controller take several iterations to improve the performance of the biomechanical outcome. Development tools built to assist users to better adapt to the device. One concluding able body testing is performed to validate knee scaling control.