A Novel Control Method of A Soft Exosuit with Plantar Pressure Sensors

Daily tasks of nurses include manual handling to assist patients. Repetitive manual handling leads to high risk of injuries due to the loads on nurses’ bodies. Nurses, in hospitals and care homes, can benefit from the advances in exoskeleton technology assisting their manual handling tasks. There are already exoskeletons both in the market and in the research area made to assist physical workers to handle heavy loads. However, those exoskeletons are mostly designed for men, as most physical workers are men, whereas most nurses are women. In the case of nurses, they handle patients, a more delicate task than handling objects, and any such device used by nurses should easily be disinfected. In this study, the needs of nurses are examined, and a review of the state-of-the-art exoskeletons is conducted from the perspective of to what extent the existing technologies address the needs of nurses. Possible solutions and technologies and particularly the needs that have not been addressed by the existing technologies are discussed.

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“…SIAT Soft Exosuit (SSEX) [85] Healthy adults Hip, Legs Assists during walking by decreasing muscle activity.…”

Section: Comparison Of Available Exoskeletonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Review of Exoskeletons Considering Nurses

Rayssiguie

Erden

2022

Sensors

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“…The movement of wear is not interfered by EH device, so the EH device is able to work with wearable exosuit together. In the system of wearable exsuit [27], foot pressure sensors or wireless IMU are powered by additional battery. These sensors are far away from the exosuit, it will increase the complexity of system if they are powered with cable.…”

Section: Experiments Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Portable Energy Harvesting Device Mounted on Shoes: Performance and Impact on Wearer

Wang

Liu

et al. 2020

Energies

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With the rapid development of microelectronic technology, increasing wearable devices are available for us in daily lives. These wearable devices are usually powered by batteries, so the endurance of wearable devices is limited by battery capacity. Biomechanical energy harvesting (EH) is a promising approach to extend the endurance or replace batteries to power microelectronic devices. In this paper, we would first review the different types of EH devices and analyze the key technologies. Secondly, to compare the advantages and disadvantages of different EH devices, the design guidelines of the EH device is proposed. According to the design guidelines, an EH device with a weight of only 110 g is designed, which is lighter than the suspended-load backpack (38 kg) and the knee harvester (1.6 kg). Our EH device is able to convert the vibrations energy generated by the motion of lower limbs into electrical energy. Finally, to verify whether our EH device meets the design guidelines, three sets of experiment are conducted to evaluate the performance of the EH device. Experiment A is used to monitor the metabolic energy and electricity energy. According to experiment data, we calculate the COH and TCOH of EH device. The lowest COH and TCOH are 58 and 59, respectively. The TCOH of our EH device is higher than suspended-load backpack (30.7) and the knee harvester (13.6). Experiment B is used to test the adaptability of the EH device under the different conditions of terrains and walking speeds. The EH device is able to harvest energy in different terrains (up and down stair, at the treadmill with a slope of 0°, 5° and 10°) and at different speeds(4 km/h~8 km/h). The converted electrical power is up to 7.71 mW during walking at the speed of 8 km/h and is up to 5.28 mW when going up stairs. Experiment C is conducted to investigate the influence of the EH device on human motion by measuring the torque of the ankle, knee, and hip joints. When comparing the curves of torque, the EH device does not influence the biological moment of joints, indicating the EH device does not interfere with the movement. At the same time, another method to calculate the TCOH by calculating the net work done by the muscle in a gait cycle is proposed. When comparing the TCOH calculated by the metabolic energy with the TCOH calculated by the additional work done by the muscle, the results are basically the same. Meanwhile, the variation of the latter calculation result is smaller, indicating the method proposed by us is more precise.

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“…From the point of view of ordinary users, the soft exosuit has better shape adaptability, lower-key appearance, better compliance, and much lighter weight than traditional exoskeleton, making it more suitable to wear [8,9]. The soft exosuit can also be divided into single-joint assisting and multi-joint combined assisting depending on the number of assisted joints [10][11][12]. According to the power source, it is divided into powered and unpowered exoskeletons, both of which are the research hotspots of exoskeletons.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Novel Lightweight Wearable Soft Exosuit for Reducing the Metabolic Rate and Muscle Fatigue

Chen

Wang

et al. 2021

Biosensors

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Wearable robotic devices have been proved to considerably reduce the energy expenditure of human walking. It is not only suitable for healthy people, but also for some patients who require rehabilitation exercises. However, in many cases, the weight of soft exosuits are relatively large, which makes it difficult for the assistant effect of the system to offset the metabolic consumption caused by the extra weight, and the heavy weight will make people uncomfortable. Therefore, reducing the weight of the whole system as much as possible and keeping the soft exosuit output power unchanged, may improve the comfort of users and further reduce the metabolic consumption. In this paper, we show that a novel lightweight soft exosuit which is currently the lightest among all known powered exoskeletons, which assists hip flexion. Indicated from the result of experiment, the novel lightweight soft exosuit reduces the metabolic consumption rate of wearers when walking on the treadmill at 5 km per hour by 11.52% compared with locomotion without the exosuit. Additionally, it can reduce more metabolic consumption than the hip extension assisted (HEA) and hip flexion assisted (HFA) soft exosuit which our team designed previously, which has a large weight. The muscle fatigue experiments show that using the lightweight soft exosuit can also reduce muscle fatigue by about 10.7%, 40.5% and 5.9% for rectus femoris, vastus lateralis and gastrocnemius respectively compared with locomotion without the exosuit. It is demonstrated that decreasing the weight of soft exosuit while maintaining the output almost unchanged can further reduce metabolic consumption and muscle fatigue, and appropriately improve the users’ comfort.

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A Novel Control Method of A Soft Exosuit with Plantar Pressure Sensors

Cited by 9 publications

References 17 publications

A Review of Exoskeletons Considering Nurses

A Review of Exoskeletons Considering Nurses

A New Portable Energy Harvesting Device Mounted on Shoes: Performance and Impact on Wearer

A Novel Lightweight Wearable Soft Exosuit for Reducing the Metabolic Rate and Muscle Fatigue

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