Developing a Lower-Limb Rehabilitation Machine and Evaluating Pedaling Validity Based on Muscle Synergy

Maintaining gait function is one of the factors that guarantee a healthy daily life. In this study, we developed an independent left and right lower limb pedaling machine to maintain and improve the gait muscles. The left and right pedals are each connected to a motor, which not only applies load but also provides assistance to the pedals. A PID controller applies a desired load or assistance precisely. To verify the effectiveness of the pedaling machine, we extracted muscle synergies between walking and pedaling movements using consTD and compared them using cosine similarity. The results show that a larger pedal load provides us a higher similarity between walking and pedaling movements.