Modular hip exoskeleton improves walking function and reduces sedentary time in community-dwelling older adults.

BACKGROUND: Despite the benefits of physical activity for healthy physical and cognitive aging, 35% of adults over the age of 75 in the United States are inactive. Robotic exoskeleton-based exercise studies have shown benefits in improving walking function, but most are conducted in clinical settings with a neurologically impaired population. Emerging technology is starting to enable easy-to-use, lightweight, wearable robots, but their impact in the otherwise healthy older adult population remains mostly unknown. For the first time, this study investigates the feasibility and efficacy of using a lightweight, modular hip exoskeleton for in-community gait training in the older adult population to improve walking function. METHODS: Twelve adults over the age of 65 were enrolled in a gait training intervention involving twelve 30-min sessions using the Gait Enhancing and Motivating System for Hip in their own senior living community. RESULTS: Performance-based outcome measures suggest clinically significant improvements in balance, gait speed, and endurance following the exoskeleton training, and the device was safe and well tolerated. Gait speed below 1.0 m/s is an indicator of fall risk, and two out of the four participants below this threshold increased their self-selected gait speed over 1.0 m/s after intervention. Time spent in sedentary behavior also decreased significantly. CONCLUSIONS: This intervention resulted in greater improvements in speed and endurance than traditional exercise programs, in significantly less time. Together, our results demonstrated that exoskeleton-based gait training is an effective intervention and novel approach to encouraging older adults to exercise and reduce sedentary time, while improving walking function. Future work will focus on whether the device can be used independently long-term by older adults as an everyday exercise and community-use personal mobility device. Trial registration This study was retrospectively registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (ID: NCT05197127).

A Wearable Virtual Chair with the Passive Stability Assist.

This paper introduces a wearable device which performs function of swinging chair with worn status on the legs. The users with the proposed device can sit in anyplace and experience the stable swing motion. The device is designed to maintain the stability within the stable swing region while moving back and forth by external forces or user intension. The coupled motion between ankle and knee provides the users concave swing motion in chair mode, while the joints passively follows the motion of the legs in normal gait mode. The key feature of this stable motion is a CAM-drive implemented around the ankle frame and connected to the knee joint by wires. With any directional motion of the ankle joint, the knee joint rotate only one direction to lift up the body of the user. So it can move following concave equilibrium line. We verified the payload of the device is more than 70 kg in computer-aided stress simulation as well as in experiments.

Development of the SAIT single-port surgical access robot--slave arm based on RCM mechanism.

An innovative single-port surgical robot has recently been developed by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). The robot can reach various surgical sites inside the abdominal cavity from a single incision on the body. It has two 7-DOF surgical tools, a 3-DOF endoscope, a flexible hyper-redundant 6-DOF guide tube, and a 6-DOF manipulator. This paper primarily focuses on the manipulator, called a slave arm, which is capable of setting the location of a Remote Center Motion (RCM) point. Because the surgical tools can explore the abdominal area through a small incision point when the RCM point is aligned with the incision area, the RCM mechanism is an integral part of the manipulator for single-port surgery. The mechanical feature, operational principle, control method, and the system architecture of the slave arm are introduced in this paper. In addition, manipulation experiments conducted validate its efficacy.