Soft Power Suit for Knee Motion Assistance

Soft Power Suit for Knee Motion Assistance

  A wearable device is proposed and developed in order to provide comfortable human motion assistance. Unlike the conventional power amplifying devices, the ultimate goal of "soft power suit" which is proposed in this study is to achieve comfortable assistance only at target parts of the body with relatively light assisting power rather than high power amplification. In this paper a pair of soft power suits for knee motion assistance is proposed. The proposed soft power suits are composed of exoskeletons, sensors, actuators and a controller. Four pneumatic artificial muscles are used to actuate the soft power suit for each leg. They are controlled based on the information about muscle activity obtained from innovative muscle stiffness sensors developed by authors. The effectiveness of the developed soft power suits is evaluated through two experiments. One is to evaluate the effectiveness of the soft power suit in enhancing operator"s strength, and the other one is to evaluate the effectiveness in reducing fatigue during repetitive knee joint exercise. It was verified that the soft power suit reinforces operator"s strength and reduces fatigue.