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A Robust Design Procedure For Improvement Of Quality Of Lower-Limb Prosthesis, Nian-Zhong Chen, Winson Lee, Ming Zhang

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Lower-limb prostheses are used to restore amputee's walking. Monolimb is one of the designs referring to socket and the shank being molded into one piece of thermoplastic material. Appropriate shank flexibility of a monolimb can improve gait of an amputee. However, during the fabrication, the variations of design variables are inevitably produced which may lead the unexpected shank deflection and directly influence on gait efficiency of an amputee. This paper presents a robust design procedure for improvement of quality of the monolimb by simultaneously minimizing performance variations caused by variations in design variables and bringing the mean value of performance …