Abstract
Tripping is a major cause of falls in elderly people. Considering that fall related injuries have severe consequences on their quality of life, there is an urgent need to develop preventive solutions. One such solution could be the use of assistive exoskeletons. In this work we investigated the effects of a hip exoskeleton on human posture under the influence of an external perturbation. During normal standing of a subject we applied a forward pulling force at the chest and then enabled or disabled the exoskeleton randomly. By analysing the kinematics of the human body we compared responses to perturbations when the exoskeleton was enabled or disabled. The results show that the exoskeleton efficiently reduced the forward inclination of the trunk by 40%.
This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 through the SPEXOR project (contract no. 687662); AnDy project (contract nr. 731540); and by the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding no. P2-0076).
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Jamšek, M., Babič, J. (2019). Human Trunk Stabilization with Hip Exoskeleton for Enhanced Postural Control. In: Carrozza, M., Micera, S., Pons, J. (eds) Wearable Robotics: Challenges and Trends. WeRob 2018. Biosystems & Biorobotics, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01887-0_87
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01887-0_87
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