“…It is worth highlighting that the muscular activity index results of this work were obtained with a procedure fundamentally different from the one used in other comparable studies (e.g., Simpson et al, 2017 ; Thalman et al, 2018 ): the admittance controller that we designed allowed the suit to continuously move in concert with its wearer while delivering an assistive torque. The other studies listed here lacked an intention–detection strategy.…”
Soft exosuits are a promising solution for the assistance and augmentation of human motor abilities in the industrial field, where the use of more symbiotic wearable robots can avoid excessive worker fatigue and improve the quality of the work. One of the challenges in the design of soft exosuits is the choice of the right amount of softness to balance load transfer, ergonomics, and weight. This article presents a cable-driven based soft wrist exosuit for flexion assistance with the use of an ergonomic reinforced glove. The flexible and highly compliant three-dimensional (3D)-printed plastic structure that is sewn on the glove allows an optimal force transfer from the remotely located motor to the wrist articulation and to preserve a high level of comfort for the user during assistance. The device is shown to reduce fatigue and the muscular effort required for holding and lifting loads in healthy subjects for weights up to 3 kg.
“…It is worth highlighting that the muscular activity index results of this work were obtained with a procedure fundamentally different from the one used in other comparable studies (e.g., Simpson et al, 2017 ; Thalman et al, 2018 ): the admittance controller that we designed allowed the suit to continuously move in concert with its wearer while delivering an assistive torque. The other studies listed here lacked an intention–detection strategy.…”
Soft exosuits are a promising solution for the assistance and augmentation of human motor abilities in the industrial field, where the use of more symbiotic wearable robots can avoid excessive worker fatigue and improve the quality of the work. One of the challenges in the design of soft exosuits is the choice of the right amount of softness to balance load transfer, ergonomics, and weight. This article presents a cable-driven based soft wrist exosuit for flexion assistance with the use of an ergonomic reinforced glove. The flexible and highly compliant three-dimensional (3D)-printed plastic structure that is sewn on the glove allows an optimal force transfer from the remotely located motor to the wrist articulation and to preserve a high level of comfort for the user during assistance. The device is shown to reduce fatigue and the muscular effort required for holding and lifting loads in healthy subjects for weights up to 3 kg.
“…The benefits of using SWRs for UB assistance avoid placing heavy components or restricting joint alignments on the user’s arms or torso. Many of these SWRs for the UB are outlined in the following sections to discuss several types of assistance in more detail.Figure 5.A brief survey of recent soft wearable robot (SWR) technologies for each of the following upper body joints: (a) A soft robotic hand developed at Harvard University at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (Cappello et al 2018b), (b) a soft assistive device for the wrist made from fabric materials (Realmuto and Sanger 2019), (c) a soft elbow exosuit designed at Arizona State University (Thalman et al 2018), (d) shoulder-assistive device also from Harvard University at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (O’Neill et al 2017), (e) trunk orthosis from the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Robertson and Paik 2016), and (f) an upper body device that assists multiple joints via cable-driven actuation (Lessard 2018). …”
Section: Upper Body Soft Assistive Roboticsmentioning
This review meta-analysis combines and compares the findings of previously published works in the field of soft wearable robots (SWRs) that provide active methods of actuation for assistive and augmentative purposes. A thorough investigation of major contributions in the field of an SWR is made to analyze trends in the field focused on fluidic and cable-driven systems, prevalent and successful approaches, and identify the future direction of SWRs and active actuation strategies. Types of soft actuators used in wearables are outlined, as well as general practices for fabrication methods of soft actuators and considerations for human–robot interface designs of garment-like exosuits. An overview of well-known and emerging upper body (UB)- and lower body (LB)-assistive technologies is categorized by the specific joints and degree of freedom (DoF) assisted and which actuator methodology is provided. Different use cases for SWRs are addressed, as well as implementation strategies and design applications.
“…The use of textiles and elastomers, intrinsically complying with the complex human biomechanics, has allowed a substantial leap in the rendering of Human-Robot interaction (HRI): explicitly in contrast with rigid exoskeletons, exosuits do not have the disadvantage of kinematic incompatibility with the human joints and they are designed with negligible distal mass on human limbs. These characteristics have allowed researchers and developers to reduce the energy cost of human walking and running (Kim et al, 2020 ) and support the upper limbs against gravity in both unimpaired users (Thalman et al, 2018 ) and neurological patients (O'Neill et al, 2020 ).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Intention detection strategies for exosuits that support the upper limbs are often limited to a manual input and open loop command, operated by an assistant or by the user her/himself: for example, for soft devices driven by a Pneumatic Interference Actuator (PIA) for shoulder support as described by O'Neill et al ( 2020 ). A similar strategy was chosen by Simpson et al ( 2020 ) for supporting shoulder abduction or by Thalman et al ( 2018 ), to assist elbow flexion. While this method is extremely practical and robust, at the same time it lacks versatility and relies on an additional, functional “hand” which must intervene in order to control a contralateral assistive device.…”
The growing field of soft wearable exosuits, is gradually gaining terrain and proposing new complementary solutions in assistive technology, with several advantages in terms of portability, kinematic transparency, ergonomics, and metabolic efficiency. Those are palatable benefits that can be exploited in several applications, ranging from strength and resistance augmentation in industrial scenarios, to assistance or rehabilitation for people with motor impairments. To be effective, however, an exosuit needs to synergistically work with the human and matching specific requirements in terms of both movements kinematics and dynamics: an accurate and timely intention-detection strategy is the paramount aspect which assume a fundamental importance for acceptance and usability of such technology. We previously proposed to tackle this challenge by means of a model-based myoelectric controller, treating the exosuit as an external muscular layer in parallel to the human biomechanics and as such, controlled by the same efferent motor commands of biological muscles. However, previous studies that used classical control methods, demonstrated that the level of device's intervention and effectiveness of task completion are not linearly related: therefore, using a newly implemented EMG-driven controller, we isolated and characterized the relationship between assistance magnitude and muscular benefits, with the goal to find a range of assistance which could make the controller versatile for both dynamic and static tasks. Ten healthy participants performed the experiment resembling functional daily activities living in separate assistance conditions: without the device's active support and with different levels of intervention by the exosuit. Higher assistance levels resulted in larger reductions in the activity of the muscles augmented by the suit actuation and a good performance in motion accuracy, despite involving a decrease of the movement velocities, with respect to the no assistance condition. Moreover, increasing torque magnitude by the exosuit resulted in a significant reduction in the biological torque at the elbow joint and in a progressive effective delay in the onset of muscular fatigue. Thus, contrarily to classical force and proportional myoelectric schemes, the implementation of an opportunely tailored EMG-driven model based controller affords to naturally match user's intention detection and provide an assistance level working symbiotically with the human biomechanics.
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