A Novel Rehabilitative Soft Robotics Knee Brace for ACL deficient patients

Anterior Cruciate Ligament rupture is one of the most common injuries contributing to osteoarthritis progression due to knee motion alteration. Reconstructive surgery often fails to recover the intact knee stability. Rehabilitative treatments as a non-invasive solution can used to strengthen the Hamstring muscles which contributes to the anterior-posterior stability. These exercises are very time and cost expensive . in order to overcome the non-effective passive knee braces in the market, in the current study A soft robotics knee brace was developed in order to improve anterior-posterior stability by contributing to Hamstring muscles group activation. The soft robotics knee brace can be actuated inside MRI which enables direct evaluation of the effectiveness. In order to validate the effectiveness of the developed knee brace two experiments were performed, seated leg curl and gait analysis. The outcomes confirmed that the soft robotics knee brace could reduce the Hamstring group activation.