A Novel Lightweight Wearable Soft Exosuit for Reducing the Metabolic Rate and Muscle Fatigue

Abstract

Wearable robotic devices have been proved to considerably reduce the energy expenditure of human walking. It is not only suitable for healthy people, but also for some patients who require rehabilitation exercises. However, in many cases, the weight of soft exosuits are relatively large, which makes it difficult for the assistant effect of the system to offset the metabolic consumption caused by the extra weight, and the heavy weight will make people uncomfortable. Therefore, reducing the weight of the whole system as much as possible and keeping the soft exosuit output power unchanged, may improve the comfort of users and further reduce the metabolic consumption. In this paper, we show that a novel lightweight soft exosuit which is currently the lightest among all known powered exoskeletons, which assists hip flexion. Indicated from the result of experiment, the novel lightweight soft exosuit reduces the metabolic consumption rate of wearers when walking on the treadmill at 5 km per hour by 11.52% compared with locomotion without the exosuit. Additionally, it can reduce more metabolic consumption than the hip extension assisted (HEA) and hip flexion assisted (HFA) soft exosuit which our team designed previously, which has a large weight. The muscle fatigue experiments show that using the lightweight soft exosuit can also reduce muscle fatigue by about 10.7%, 40.5% and 5.9% for rectus femoris, vastus lateralis and gastrocnemius respectively compared with locomotion without the exosuit. It is demonstrated that decreasing the weight of soft exosuit while maintaining the output almost unchanged can further reduce metabolic consumption and muscle fatigue, and appropriately improve the users’ comfort.