A Portable Waist-Loaded Soft Exosuit for Hip Flexion Assistance with Running

Abstract

The soft exosuit is an emerging robotics, which has been proven to considerably reduce the metabolic consumption of human walking and running. However, compared to walking, relatively few soft exosuits have been studied for running. Many soft exosuits used for running are worn on the back and with a heavy weight load, which may cause instability while running and potentially increase metabolic consumption. Therefore, reducing the weight of the whole soft exosuit system as much as possible and keeping the soft exosuit close to the center of gravity, may improve running stability and further reduce metabolic consumption. In this paper, a portable waist-loaded soft exosuit, the weight of which is almost entirely concentrated at the waist, is shown to assist hip flexion during running, and justifies choosing to assist hip flexion while running. As indicated by the experiments of motion flexibility, wearing the waist-loaded soft exosuit can assist in performing many common and complex motions. The metabolic consumption experiments proved that the portable waist-loaded soft exosuit reduces the metabolic consumption rate of wearers when jogging on the treadmill at 6 km per hour by 7.79% compared with locomotion without the exosuit. Additionally, at the running speed of 8 km per hour, using the waist-loaded soft exosuit can reduce metabolic consumption rate by 4.74%. Similarly, at the running speed of 10 km per hour, it also can be reduced by 6.12%. It is demonstrated that assisting hip flexion for running is also a reasonable method, and wearing the waist-loaded soft exosuit can keep human motion flexibility and reduce metabolic consumption.

Towards Human-like Walking with Biomechanical and Neuromuscular Control Features: Personalized Attachment Point Optimization Method of Cable-Driven Exoskeleton

“…A wearable soft robotic exosuit incorporating a portable cable actuation system is introduced, applying hip abduction torque to potentially mitigate knee osteoarthritis progression by reducing external knee adduction moment (Yang et al, 2022). A portable waist-loaded soft exosuit, concentrated at the waist, effectively aids hip flexion during running, demonstrated through motion flexibility experiments (Chen et al, 2022). In Biao et al (2023), a novel flexible Bowden cable-driven exoskeleton is introduced, with each joint controlled by a pair of antagonistic muscles.…”

Design Methodology and Experimental Study of a Lower Extremity Soft Exosuit

“…Wearable robot technology belongs to a comprehensive research field that uses fused sensor information to control and assist joint movement, in attempting to break through the limits of human physical activity [1][2][3]. Its main application scenarios are physical enhancement for healthy people [4,5] and rehabilitation training for non-healthy groups [6][7][8]. In both aspects, rigid exoskeleton systems have made great progress, but there are still problems such as the large size and mass of the device and limited movement for the wearer.…”