Biomechanical and Physiological Evaluation of Multi-Joint Assistance With Soft Exosuits

IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2017 Feb;25(2):119-130. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2016.2523250. Epub 2016 Jan 28.

Abstract

To understand the effects of soft exosuits on human loaded walking, we developed a reconfigurable multi-joint actuation platform that can provide synchronized forces to the ankle and hip joints. Two different assistive strategies were evaluated on eight subjects walking on a treadmill at a speed of 1.25 m/s with a 23.8 kg backpack: 1) hip extension assistance and 2) multi-joint assistance (hip extension, ankle plantarflexion and hip flexion). Results show that the exosuit introduces minimum changes to kinematics and reduces biological joint moments. A reduction trend in muscular activity was observed for both conditions. On average, the exosuit reduced the metabolic cost of walking by 0.21 ±0.04 and 0.67 ±0.09 W/kg for hip extension assistance and multi-joint assistance respectively, which is equivalent to an average metabolic reduction of 4.6% and 14.6%, demonstrating that soft exosuits can effectively improve human walking efficiency during load carriage without affecting natural walking gait. Moreover, it indicates that actuating multiple joints with soft exosuits provides a significant benefit to muscular activity and metabolic cost compared to actuating single joint.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Artificial Limbs*
  • Elastic Modulus
  • Equipment Design
  • Equipment Failure Analysis
  • Exoskeleton Device*
  • Gait / physiology*
  • Humans
  • Leg / physiology*
  • Neurological Rehabilitation / instrumentation*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Robotics / instrumentation*
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Walking / physiology*