Muscle textile to implement soft suit to shift balancing posture of the body

Abstract

This study reports on the design and construction of a body support suit based on two novel concepts: muscle textile and shifting the balancing posture of the body. The muscle textile is an active textile composed of soft thin muscles that provides a large supporting force, and is flexible and lightweight. Shifting the balancing posture of the body involves changing its neutral posture while relaxing the muscles, making it easier to perform tasks in uncomfortable positions and simplifying the control system of the support suit. These two ideas are employed herein to design a flexible, light, comfortable, and simple support suit system. We then propose and test a soft suit intended to assist humans in tasks involving unnatural arm positions based on this design. The performed subjective experiments confirmed that the 2 kg soft suit attained a selfweight compensation of up to 120° forward, a reduction of 33% in the integrated electromyogram in the brachialis muscle, and a suppression of 5% of body sway.

A review of soft wearable robots that provide active assistance: Trends, common actuation methods, fabrication, and applications

“…Development for shoulder SWRs became a more active research topic in the later 2010s as NASA began to invest in the "Armstrong," a wearable suit for astronauts that used tendons to assist the shoulder (Kadivar et al 2017). It was around the time of this development that increasingly advanced textile actuators emerged in the field (Natividad and Yeow 2016;O'Neill et al 2017) and McKibben muscles showed more sophisticated and effective designs (Abe et al 2018). The shoulder has proven to be a difficult joint to assist, and some of the most prevalent SWRs tackling this goal are still seeking to find actuators that most closely resemble human muscle functions and placements (Abe et al 2019).…”

“…Fluidic actuation approaches specific to the elbow begun to emerge in the 2010s with other pneumatic SWRs and varied stylistically to match the specific need the exosuit is trying to fulfill (Abe et al 2018). Some used a bellows-type design to push the elbow into extension and pull it into flexion from the armpit area (Oguntosin et al 2015), while others designed for rotary actuators placed on the exterior side of the elbow joint to apply a rotational torque to induce flexion assistance (Aragane et al 2008;Noritsugu et al 2008;Thalman et al 2018).…”

Characteristic Analysis and Design Optimization of Bubble Artificial Muscles

“…3 Although pneumatic exoskeletons were initially made of mostly rigid components, 4,5 more recently they have been developed with more flexible, compliant elements. [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] Soft exoskeletons and artificial muscles have also used a range of power sources, including cable-tendon-driven mechanisms, that is, Exosuit, 16 Myosuit, 17 and XoSoft 18 ; direct electro-mechanical energy transduction in polymers, for example, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel, 19,20 dielectric elastomers, 21,22 dielectrophoretic liquid zipping actuators, 23 and Peano-HASEL 24 ; and thermomechanical actuation such as coiled polymer. 25 PAMs are soft, flexible contractile actuators that change shape and contract when activated by pressurized air.…”

A Real-Time Stability Control Method Through sEMG Interface for Lower Extremity Rehabilitation Exoskeletons

“…Sogang University in Korea developed a exoskeleton namely SUBAR (Chen et al, 2013;Hwang and Jeon, 2018), which could estimate the muscular torque of its wearer. Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (Mertz, 2012) and Harvard University (Abe et al, 2018) have also made solid progress in the development of assisted exoskeletons. The Chinese University of Science and Technology designed an exoskeleton robot driven by a servo motor and developed a fuzzy algorithm for lower extremity exoskeleton (Huang et al, 2016a).…”