Preliminary Design and Testing of a Muscle-Powered Walking Exoskeleton for People With Spinal Cord Injury

There are 275,000 people in the US who have spinal cord injury (SCI) and there are about 12,500 new cases each year [1]. Among these 18.5% have incomplete paraplegia and 23% have complete paraplegia [1]. The number of patients experiencing mobility impairment caused by SCI is increasing because of accidents and disease [2,3]. Among people with SCI, 51% identified walking as first choice for a technology application [4].