Optimized hip-knee-ankle exoskeleton assistance reduces the metabolic cost of walking with worn loads.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Load carriage is common in a wide range of professions, but prolonged load carriage is associated with increased fatigue and overuse injuries. Exoskeletons could improve the quality of life of these professionals by reducing metabolic cost to combat fatigue and reducing muscle activity to prevent injuries. Current exoskeletons have reduced the metabolic cost of loaded walking by up to 22% relative to walking in the device with no assistance when assisting one or two joints. Greater metabolic reductions may be possible with optimized assistance of the entire leg.

Methods

We used human-in the-loop optimization to optimize hip-knee-ankle exoskeleton assistance with no additional load, a light load (15% of body weight), and a heavy load (30% of body weight) for three

SUBMITTER: Bryan GM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8572578 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature