A soft exosuit enhances lower-limb biomechanics using flexible elements to create joint moments. It adapts to user-specific factors like BMI, sex, and gait, optimizing power efficiency and reducing muscle activity asymmetry, particularly aiding individuals with mobility impairments.
Exosuits, designed to enhance human mobility, face significant challenges due to their reliance on the user’s body shape and movement patterns. These soft, flexible devices aim to assist lower-limb biomechanics by creating joint moments through actuated elements that span the joints. However, the effectiveness of exosuits is highly dependent on the user’s anthropometrics, such as body mass index (BMI), biological sex, and individualized gait patterns, which vary with different terrains.
Current exosuit designs struggle to accommodate the vast diversity in human body shapes and movement contexts, leading to variability in performance. This variability poses a challenge in optimizing exosuit configurations to provide consistent assistance across different users. Additionally, the lack of rigid structures in exosuits complicates the development of efficient motor-driven systems, as the mechanical advantage is influenced by the moment arm created around the user’s joints.
To address these challenges, there is a need for advanced modeling techniques that can simulate the interaction between the exosuit and the user’s body, enabling the design of personalized assistive devices that can adapt to the unique characteristics of each user.
The soft exosuit is a wearable device designed to enhance lower-limb biomechanics by employing flexible elements that span joints, creating moments around them. This technology is tailored to individual users by considering factors such as body mass index (BMI), biological sex, and gait kinematics.
The exosuit incorporates a computational model that simulates its behavior, optimizing configurations to maximize mechanical advantage and power efficiency based on user-specific data. It allows for adjustments in attachment configurations, ensuring the device can accommodate a diverse range of users and tasks. The exosuit’s design includes a belt with adjustable loops and brackets, braces for body parts, and elements like elastic bands or actuators, all configured to support personalized biomechanical goals.
What differentiates this technology is its adaptability and user-centric design. Unlike rigid exoskeletons, the soft exosuit is lightweight and conforms to the user’s body, aiding without restricting movement. Its performance is highly influenced by the user’s unique body shape and gait patterns, making it suitable for a wide range of applications, from assisting individuals with mobility impairments to enhancing the physical abilities of healthy users.
The use of advanced modeling and optimization techniques allows for precise adjustments to the exosuit’s configuration, ensuring optimal performance tailored to each user’s specific needs. This adaptability, combined with its ability to reduce the metabolic cost of walking and improve gait symmetry, sets the soft exosuit apart as a versatile and effective mobility aid.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240189980A1/en?oq=18%2f359%2c521