TY  - null

TI  - Biomechanical and Physiological Evaluation of Multi-joint Assistance with Soft Exosuits
T2  - IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
SP  - 1
EP  - 1
AU  - Y. Ding
AU  - I. Galiana
AU  - A. Asbeck
AU  - S. De Rossi
AU  - J. Bae
AU  - T. Santos
AU  - V. Araujo
AU  - S. Lee
AU  - K. Holt
AU  - C. Walsh
PY  - 2016
KW  - Actuators
KW  - Cable shielding
KW  - Force
KW  - Hip
KW  - Legged locomotion
KW  - Muscles
KW  - Assistive robotics
KW  - biomechanics
KW  - human-robot interaction
KW  - soft exosuits
DO  - 10.1109/TNSRE.2016.2523250
JO  - IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
IS  - 99
SN  - 1534-4320
VO  - PP
VL  - PP
JA  - IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
Y1  - 
AB  - To understand the effects of soft exosuits on human loaded walking, we developed a reconfigurable multi-joint actuation platform that can provide synchronized forces to the ankle and hip joints. Two different assistive strategies were evaluated on eight subjects walking on a treadmill at a speed of 1.25 m/s with a 23.8 kg backpack: 1) hip extension assistance and 2) multi-joint assistance (hip extension, ankle plantarflexion and hip flexion). Results show that the exosuit introduces minimum changes to kinematics and reduces biological joint moments. A reduction trend in muscular activity was observed for both conditions. On average, the exosuit reduced the metabolic cost of walking by 0.21 ± 0.04 W/kg and 0.67 ± 0.09 W/kg for hip extension assistance and multi-joint assistance respectively, which is equivalent to an average metabolic reduction of 4.6% and 14.6% demonstrating that soft exosuits can effectively improve human walking efficiency during load carriage without affecting natural walking gait. Moreover, it indicates that actuating multiple joints with soft exosuits provides a significant benefit to muscular activity and metabolic cost compared to actuating single joint.
ER  -