A Novel Soft Exosuit Based on Biomechanical Analysis for Assisting Lower Extremity

In the past two decades, with growing focus of lower limb exoskeleton, large variety of rigid exoskeletons were designed for medical rehabilitation and the other purposes. Compared with the rigid exoskeletons, which added extra inertial to low limb and restricted wearers' movement, the soft wearable lower extremity exoskeleton minimized the impact of these factors on the human body locomotion. In this paper, a novel design of exosuit that provided assistive force for both hip extension and flexion through the variation in hip joint dynamics during strides was proposed. Based on the change of hip moment, an assistance strategy and assistance force curve were came up with. PD type iterative learning control (ILC) method was introduced to reduce the error caused by wearing position and biological characteristics to improve assistance performance. To evaluate assistance performance, the metabolic cost of four subjects wearing exosuit and walking on treadmill at 5km/h in the situations of that without assistance, assisting both hip extension and hip flexion, and assisting hip extension respectively was measured. Compared with assisting hip extension only and wearing exosuit with no assistance, results indicated that the decrease in average net metabolic cost of assisting both hip extension and flexion was 0.445W/kg and 1.027W/kg respectively, corresponding to the average net metabolic cost rate decrease was 7.45% and 15.67%.