Biomechanics Underlying Subject-Dependent Variability in Motor Adaptation to Soft Exosuit Assistance

Abstract

Exosuits and exoskeletons have been shown to reduce the metabolic cost of walking by over 20%. While many studies have shown promising group-averaged data, there has often been high variability in individual response to assistance even when using standardized procedures and device platforms. Here, we aim to investigate the biomechanical differences in adaptation to exosuit assistance, and present initial data from seven subjects that show differences between the joint kinematics and kinetics, and muscle activations of individuals who display small vs large metabolic benefits. Future work will focus on expanding this work to understand general principles for predicting metabolic benefit and understanding sensorimotor adaptations over longer time-scales. We believe this effort will be instrumental towards understanding the potential for exosuit and exoskeleton assistance in gait augmentation and in clinical settings, for both rehabilitative and assistive applications.

K. Swaminathan is also supported by the NSF, and S. Lee is supported by Samsung. This material is based upon the work supported by the NSF (grant #CNS-1446464 and Graduate Research Fellowship), the Wyss Institute, the Paulson School at Harvard and the Technology for Equitable and Assessable Medicine initiative at Harvard.