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Adaptive Walking Exosuit

18.11.2021

Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. John A. Paulson (SEAS, USA) has developed a new robotic exosuit that can adapt to a specific person and adapt to various walking tasks. The bioinspired system uses ultrasound measurements of muscle dynamics.

People rarely walk at a constant speed and on a perfectly level surface. We accelerate when we rush to the next meeting, when we respond to a signal for a pedestrian crossing. Or we slow down when we go for a walk in the park. The surface and its angle of inclination is also constantly changing, whether we are hiking or climbing a ramp into a building. In addition, the way we walk is influenced by our physiological characteristics: gender, height, age and muscle strength, and sometimes by neurological or muscular disorders such as stroke or Parkinson's disease.

Such variability makes it difficult to develop a versatile exosuit - essentially a wearable robot - that will help people walk in everyday life. Today's walking assistant robots take hours to set up - and sometimes by hand. This is a tedious task for healthy people and often impossible for the elderly or clinical patients.

In the past, when developing individual assistance profiles for robotic exosuits, scientists have focused on the dynamic movements of the wearer's limbs. The SEAS researchers took a different approach. They used ultrasound to "look" under the skin and directly measured how the user's muscles act during different types of walking.

The scientists attached a portable ultrasound system to the study participants' calves and visualized their muscles as they performed a series of walking tasks. Based on these pre-recorded images, the group estimated how much assistive force needed to be applied in parallel with the calf work to compensate for the additional muscle work needed to push off the person's leg while walking.

The new system took only a few seconds of walking - or even just one step - to capture the profile of the muscles. Then, for each ultrasound-generated profile, the researchers measured how much metabolic energy the person used while walking with and without the exosuit. It turned out that the exosuit significantly reduces metabolic energy when walking at different speeds and on different surfaces.

When tested in real conditions, the exosuit was able to quickly adapt to changes in walking speed and surface slope.

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