Soft Wearable Augmented Walking Suit With Pneumatic Gel Muscles and Stance Phase Detection System to Assist Gait

Abstract

The lower limbs of the human body are responsible for human locomotion and maintaining a good quality of life. However, there are many instances of muscle fatigue or injuries caused by stressful work environments, aging, and work that involves walking a long distance. Therefore, there is a need for an assistive suit for walking that can unload muscle efforts during walking and reduce the chances of lower-limb muscle fatigue. In this letter, we discuss the development of a lightweight and wearable augmented walking suit (AWS) using pneumatic gel muscle and its actuation control the using lower limb pose detection mechanism considering the human gait cycle. The objective of this assistive suit is to reduce the required muscle effort of the posterior and anterior muscles during the swing phase of the gait cycle, thereby making it easier to move forward. To evaluate the effects of the AWS, an experiment was conducted to record the surface EMG (sEMG) of eight primary lower limb muscles of seven subjects for two levels of assistive air pressure. The evaluation was done based on the sEMG signal envelope and the statistical difference in the average percentage of maximum voluntary contraction of the measured muscles. In our result, we found that all muscles showed a statistically significant reduction or no change in muscle activity while wearing the AWS as compared with when the AWS was not worn.