Preliminary study for a soft wearable knee extensor to assist physically weak people

Abstract

To assist the walk of the physically weak people is important to increase their quality of life because it can expand their activity area. We present a soft wearable knee extensor, called Knee Tendon-suit, which assist the knee extension during climbing stairs. To achieve our goal, we used the tendon-driven mechanism for transmitting the actuation force and the anchor structure for transmitting the actuation force to the body. Measuring Electromyography (EMG) at the femoral muscles and the tension at the anchor, we verified performance of the Knee Tendon-suit as the first preliminary result.