Robotic Boot-like Exoskeleton Personalizes Assistance To Help People Walk Faster, Easier

Engineers from the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory have made a lab-based robotic boot-like exoskeleton that helps wearers walk and run faster with reduced effort after many years of careful development.

"This exoskeleton personalizes assistance as people walk normally through the real world," says associate Professor Steve Collins in the press release. He added that their robotic boot resulted in exceptional improvements in walking speed and energy economy.

Personalizing Exoskeleton Assistance in the Real World

Per the report of Yahoo!, the robotic boot works with calf muscles that give the wearer an extra push with every step to help push the feet off the ground while walking and running. Through this, it adds a 9% boost in walking speed while also using 17% less energy while traveling. The authors wrote that energy conservation and speed are equivalent to taking off a 30-pound backpack.

Unlike other exoskeletons, the push is personalized thanks to the machine learning-based model trained for years using emulators as well as an array of sensors to customize itself to the personal gaits and movements of the user. The AI could learn to best optimize its torque to the wearer after only an hour of walking around using it for the first time.

Personalization is the major barrier to an effective exoskeleton as most of them were designed using a combination of intuition or biomimicry. However, humans are complicated and diverse creatures for that to work well.

The engineers relied on their exoskeleton emulators to address that problem, says the press release. Exoskeleton emulators are large, immobile, expensive laboratory setups that can rapidly test the best way to assist people and discover blueprints for portable devices to work outside the lab.

Students and volunteers hooked up to the emulators to gather data about motion and energy expenditure to understand how a person walks with the exoskeleton and the amount of energy used. The data revealed different kinds of assistance the emulator offers and inform the AI real-world exoskeleton that can now adapt to the user.

Who Can Use the Robotic Boot-like Exoskeleton?

The resulting untethered exoskeleton can monitor movement using the array sensors in the robotic boot. The prototype is still a tangle of wires that attaches a shoe and below the knee, The Verge reports.

The study titled "Personalizing Exoskeleton Assistance While Walking in the Real World" published in the journal Nature only tested the exoskeleton on healthy adults in their mid-20s. That means there is still a long way to go to confirm if it can be used to help older people and those who need assistance in walking, such as people with demanding jobs.

More so, it is still a prototype; more research and experimentation are needed before it will become available. They have not yet set an estimated price for the exoskeleton as a medical or consumer product. The research team noted that showing that an exoskeleton can improve movement in the real world is a first in the field of robotics.

Study author Patrick Slade, a bioengineering researcher, said that ideas of personalized assistance and effective portable exoskeletons will become more abundant in the next decade to help many people overcome mobility challenges.

Watch the video below to see how the robotic boot-like exoskeleton works:

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