Investigation on correlation between mechanical prop-erties of the prosthetic foot and the pylon in the lower limb amputee

A suitable prosthesis possesses appropriate stiffness and damping property which can de-crease the magnitude of transient forces which exert on a patient‟s lower limb amputated dur-ing walking. In more cases, the effectiveness of mechanical properties prosthetic components has been investigated separately in the literature. In order to quantitative investigate different prosthetic feet and pylons an optimization method was implemented on dimensionless objec-tive function which is driven from motion equations of 5-Degree-Of-Free (DOF) mass-spring-damper model. The optimization method was used to find a region including the best Elasto-damping parameters of the pylon as well as the spring and the damper coefficients of the prosthetic foot which can significantly attenuate the shock loads of transient forces. As a result, the optimized region was introduced as a safe region where the values of the objective function were minimized. In addition, results of this study showed a correlation between the Elasto-damping parameters of pylon and the mechanical properties of prosthetic foot.

Keywords:

optimization , lower limb amputee , prosthetic foot , pylon , particle swarm optimi-zation