Assisting Standing Balance Recovery for Parkinson’s Patients with a Lower-Extremity Exoskeleton Robot

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder and always results in balance loss. Although studies in lower-extremity exoskeleton robots are ample, applications with a lower-extremity exoskeleton robot for PD patients are still challenging. This paper aims to develop an effective assistive control for PD patients with a lower-extremity exoskeleton robot to maintain standing balance while being subjected to external disturbances. When an external force is applied to participants to force them to lose balance, the hip strategy for balance recovery based on the zero moment point (ZMP) metrics is used to generate a reference trajectory of the hip joint, and then, a model-free linear extended state observer (LESO)-based fuzzy sliding mode control (FSMC) is synthesized to regulate the human body to recover balance. Balance recovery trials for healthy individuals and PD patients with and without exoskeleton assistance were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed exoskeleton robot and balance recovery strategy. Our experiments demonstrated the potential effectiveness of the proposed exoskeleton robot and controller for standing balance recovery control in PD patients.