Robotic rehabilitation for physical therapy has several advantages over conventional manual rehabilitation, especially in the aspects of accuracy and repeatability. Initial attempts at robotic rehabilitation focused on training muscles by moving limbs in a fixed repetitive pattern. Later it was realized that such an approach could be suboptimal. Better approach would be the use of ‘assist-as-needed’ paradigm, where an orthotic device provides just enough assistance to enable the patient to move his leg under his own control. However, at this time, lower extremity devices which can apply appropriate forces to implement this paradigm are still in research and not commercially available. The goal of this work is to develop lower extremity orthotic devices using assist-as-needed paradigm for robotic rehabilitation. To achieve this goal two orthotic devices were developed. They are Gravity Balancing leg Orthosis (GBO) and Active Leg EXoskeleton (ALEX).

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