The Project

For this project, our team was tasked with researching and designing a knee exoskeleton to help elderly individuals with regain some of their lost mobility throughout their daily activities. Furthermore, the exoskeleton was required to:

• be passively powered, or primarily passively powered

• harvest and restore gait energy

• adaptable to gait

• safe and reliable

• customizable to the user's anatomy ( Using a MATLAB program to take user parameters and change the SolidWorks model )

Our team decided to design our exoskeleton for an individual suffering from osteoarthritis in the knee.

My Contribution

As this was a large project, the team opted to have individuals specialize in certain aspects of the design process, as this would reduce the amount of conflicts between individuals and allow team members to become experts in their particular portion of the project. I took on one of the leadership roles in the team, as well as taking charge of the programming on the project, which involved resizing the SolidWorks model based on the user's anatomy, and verifying the design would support the forces subjected to it. Through this process I improved my MATLAB skills greatly as well as learned how to perform finite element analysis using the tools within SolidWorks.

Project Outcomes

Our team was able to design the exoskeleton and prove its functionality and safety, netting us great marks in the course. Personally, I think the two primary aspects holding the design back is the weight and size, and in hindsight I wish I stood by the pneumatic design more, I feel we could have had a simpler, lighter and more effective final design with it. For the workflow itself, I would definitely change how we approached modelling parts in SolidWorks, instead of having individual files for each part, we should have designed each one in the context of the assembly with relations to other assembly components. This would have greatly sped up the modelling process and made the resizing aspect of the project much easier. Ever since this project I've made assemblies this way and greatly prefer it.