Walking and running have fundamentally different biomechanics, which makes developing devices that assist both gaits challenging. We show that a portable exosuit that assists hip extension can reduce the metabolic rate of treadmill walking at 1.5 meters per second by 9.3% and that of running at 2.5 meters per second by 4.0% compared with locomotion without the exosuit. These reduction magnitudes are comparable to the effects of taking off 7.4 and 5.7 kilograms during walking and running, respectively, and are in a range that has shown meaningful athletic performance changes. The exosuit automatically switches between actuation profiles for both gaits, on the basis of estimated potential energy fluctuations of the wearer’s center of mass. Single-participant experiments show that it is possible to reduce metabolic rates of different running speeds and uphill walking, further demonstrating the exosuit’s versatility.
This study presents the design of a lower limb-worn, soft wearable robot that assists ankle plantar flexion using soft textiles and a shape memory alloy (SMA) wire actuator. Textile-based clothing-type soft wearable robots, the smart clothes in short, are proposed to build a soft exoskeleton that is inherently lightweight and comfortable for the wearer. SMA wire actuators are embedded in the smart clothes to provide assistive forces to the wearer. The SMA wire actuator is a low-profile wire-type artificial muscle actuator, which can be embedded on the textile without any extruded parts on the clothing. We have built an SMA wire actuatorembedded smart clothing that is able to provide ankle assistive force without rigid kinematic mechanisms. The smart clothing has a mass of 428.5 g without a power battery, and it can generate an ankle moment of 100 N cm in each ankle during walking.
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