Evaluation of unplugged powered suit with pneumatic gel muscles

Abstract

Assistive suits are useful in situations such as injury, muscle fatigue, stressful work environment in factories and are also useful for different age groups in these situations. In our research, we use pneumatic gel muscles (PGM) to develop assistive suit to enhance walking gait experience. We focused on assisting the swing phase of the gait cycle as it accounts for higher metabolic costs during gait. The pneumatic gel muscles are actuated with small pumps fitted in the shoe of the contralateral foot of assisted leg. By doing this we can take advantage of dual support phase in gait cycle and provide required power for PGM. This process provides assisting force during swing phase and thus helps user with improved walking experience. To test the effectiveness of this suit we identified muscles with reduced force and activation for assisted gait using Opensim simulation and measured EMG for these muscles during experiment. Similar patterns in both simulations and experimental results were observed.