Clothes Make the Man: Soft Exosuit Lets People Run Faster and Longer
A new robotic exosuit could push the limits of human performance and lead to new wearable technologies for athletes and consumers
Running is a naturally more costly form of movement than walking, so any attempt to reduce its strain on the body must impose a minimal additional burden. The soft exosuit technology developed in the lab of Wyss Core Faculty member Conor Walsh, Ph.D., represents an ideal platform for assisted running, as its textile-based design is lightweight and moves with the body.
The team tested two different “assistance profiles,” or patterns of wire-pulling: one based on human biology that applied force starting at the point of maximum hip extension observed in normal running, and one based on a simulation of exoskeleton-assisted running from a group at Stanford University that applied force slightly later in the running stride and suggested that the optimal point to provide assistive force might not be the same as the biological norm. Confirming this suspicion, Lee and colleagues found that the simulation-based profile outperformed the biology-based profile in reducing metabolic cost by about a factor of two. As the authors note in the paper, “Our finding supports a paradigm shift toward the concept that mimicking our current understanding of biology is not necessarily always optimal.”
To clarify why applying force later in the running stride improved metabolic expenditure so dramatically, the team analyzed what was happening to the subjects’ other joints when their hip joints were being assisted by the actuating wires. They found that the simulation-based profile also affected knee extension and the forces between the foot and the ground, while the biology-based profile did not.
Credit: The Wyss Institute at Harvard University
The team hopes to continue this research to reduce the metabolic cost of running even more. “We only tested two actuation profiles in this study, so it will be interesting to see how much more the cost of running can be reduced with further optimization of the system,” says Malcolm.
“Our work at the Wyss is biologically inspired and, as shown by Conor’s team’s advance, sometimes we learn that a conventional biological view of a mechanism is not really how living systems work; we need to place individual components – in this case, a human hip joint – in context of the living whole. When we do this right, transformative new technologies emerge,” says the Wyss’ Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as Professor of Bioengineering at Harvard SEAS.
This study was funded by the Department of Defense’s DARPA Warrior Web program under Contract No. W911NF-14-C-0051, the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-1446464, Samsung, the Wyss Institute, and SEAS.
Contacts and sources:
Lindsay Brownell
The Wyss Institute at Harvard University
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2017/06/clothes-make-man-soft-exosuit-lets.html
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