Lower back pain and musculoskeletal injuries are serious concerns for workers subjected to physical workload and manual material handling tasks. Spine assistive exoskeletons are being developed to support the spine and distribute the spine load. This article presents a detailed up-to-date review on the back support exoskeletons by discussing their type (Active/Passive), structure (Rigid/Soft), power transmission methods, weight, maximum assistive force, battery technologies, tasks (lifting, bending, stooping work), kinematic compatibility and other important features. This article also assesses the back support exoskeletons in terms of their ability to reduce the physical load on the spine. By reviewing functional and structural characteristics, the goal is to increase communication and realization among ergonomics practitioners, developers, customers, and factory workers. The search resulted in reviewing 34 exoskeletons of which 16 were passive and 18 were active. In conclusion, back support exoskeletons have immense potential to significantly reduce the factors regarding work-related musculoskeletal injuries. However, various technical challenges and a lack of established safety standards limit the wide adaptation of exoskeletons in industry.

Spinal deformity is an abnormality in the spinal curves and can seriously affect the activities of daily life. The conventional way to treat spinal deformities, such as scoliosis, kyphosis, and spondylolisthesis, is to use spinal orthoses (braces). Braces have been used for centuries to apply corrective forces to the spine to treat spinal deformities or to stabilize the spine during postoperative rehabilitation. Braces have not modernized with advancements in technology, and very few braces are equipped with smart sensory design and active actuation. There is a need to enable the orthotists, ergonomics practitioners, and developers to incorporate new technologies into the passive field of bracing. This article presents a review of the conventional passive braces and highlights the advancements in spinal orthoses in terms of improved sensory designs, active actuation mechanisms, and new construction methods (CAD/CAM, three-dimensional (3D) printing). This review includes 26 spinal orthoses, comprised of passive rigid/soft braces, active dynamics braces, and torso training devices for the rehabilitation of the spine.

This paper proposes a nature inspired, meta-heuristic optimization technique to tune a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller for a robotic arm exoskeleton RAX-1. The RAX-1 is a two-degrees-of-freedom (2-DOFs) upper limb rehabilitation robotic system comprising two joints to facilitate shoulder joint movements. The conventional tuning of PID controllers using Ziegler-Nichols produces large overshoots which is not desirable for rehabilitation applications. To address this issue, nature inspired algorithms have recently been proposed to improve the performance of PID controllers. In this study, a 2-DOF PID control system is optimized offline using particle swarm optimization (PSO) and artificial bee colony (ABC). To validate the effectiveness of the proposed ABC-PID method, several simulations were carried out comparing the ABC-PID controller with the PSO-PID and a classical PID controller tuned using the Zeigler-Nichols method. Various investigations, such as determining system performance with respect to maximum overshoot, rise and settling time and using maximum sensitivity function under disturbance, were carried out. The results of the investigations show that the ABC-PID is more robust and outperforms other tuning techniques, and demonstrate the effective response of the proposed technique for a robotic manipulator. Furthermore, the ABC-PID controller is implemented on the hardware setup of RAX-1 and the response during exercise showed minute overshoot with lower rise and settling times compared to PSO and Zeigler-Nichols-based controllers.

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