Abstract
Nowadays, enhancing the physical abilities of able-bodied humans attracted the researchers’ attention besides the development of assistive devices for people with mobility disorders. As a result, the interest in designing of cheap and soft wearable exoskeletons called exosuits is distinctly growing. Careful investigation of the biological musculoskeletal systems reveals three essential features simplifying gait control. The first property is the embedded compliance in the muscle-tendon-complex (MTC). Force-velocity or damper-like muscle behavior is the second feature. The last useful feature is in the biological morphological design of multi-articular muscles. These properties can be implemented in passive, assistive devices in isolation or combination. In this paper, we summarize a few studies on passive lower limb assistive devices that benefit from these two design concepts. We elaborate more on the outcomes of a recent study on a lower limb exosuit design with two biarticular elastic elements that combine the two aforementioned mechanisms in a single device.
This article is partially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under the Grant No. AH307/2-1.
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Sharbafi, M.A. (2022). The Key Elements in the Design of Passive Assistive Devices. In: Moreno, J.C., Masood, J., Schneider, U., Maufroy, C., Pons, J.L. (eds) Wearable Robotics: Challenges and Trends. WeRob 2020. Biosystems & Biorobotics, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69547-7_4
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