Publication

Abstract : The focus of this paper is to design an artificial knee joint for lower limb prosthesis. The design is inspired by human knee anatomy replicating the tibio-femoral and patella-femoral joints for emulating the natural gait cycle. A set of 'kine spring', one of the prosthetic technologies used in knee-replacement surgeries in orthopaedic science, introduced into the proposed design that performs the tasks of the lateral collateral ligament and medial collateral ligament of the human knee. These allow limited abduction-adduction movement of the design and support the excess load on the artificial knee joint. The proposed design was modeled and simulated in Autodesk Inventor software for the joint torque and reaction forces. The springs were analyzed with various stiffness coefficients for its position retraction. The comparison of the simulation results with that of the human knee gait shows that the designed knee resembles the motions of natural knee. Further, stress analysis was performed to test the suitability of the design. These simulation results envisage that the reported design holds promise for development of an anthropomorphic artificial knee joint for lower limb prosthesis.