Reducing the metabolic rate of walking and running with a versatile, portable exosuit

By Jinsoo Kim, Giuk Lee, Roman Heimgartner, D. Arumukhom Revi, N. Karavas, D. Nathanson, Ignacio Galiana, A. Eckert-Erdheim, Patrick Murphy, D. Perry and 4 more. Science, 2019

431 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Lowering locomotion's metabolic cost Walking and running require different gaits, with each type of motion putting a greater bias on different muscles and joints. Kim et al. developed a soft, fully portable, lightweight exosuit that is able to reduce the metabolic rate for both running and walking by assisting each motion via the hip extension (see the Perspective by Pons). A waist belt holds most of the mass, thus reducing the cost of carrying the suit. By tracking the motion of the user, the suit is able to switch modes between the two types of motion automatically. Science, this issue p. 668; see also p. 636 A soft exosuit worn by humans reduces the metabolic rate for both walking and running. Walking and running have fundamentally different biomechanics, which makes developing devices that assist both gaits challenging. We show that a portable exosuit that assists hip extension can reduce the metabolic rate of treadmill walking at 1.5 meters per second by 9.3% and that of running at 2.5 meters per second by 4.0% compared with locomotion without the exosuit. These reduction magnitudes are comparable to the effects of taking off 7.4 and 5.7 kilograms during walking and running, respectively, and are in a range that has shown meaningful athletic performance changes. The exosuit automatically switches between actuation profiles for both gaits, on the basis of estimated potential energy fluctuations of the wearer’s center of mass. Single-participant experiments show that it is possible to reduce metabolic rates of different running speeds and uphill walking, further demonstrating the exosuit’s versatility.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Physical Therapy, Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/108c663daa0b911540be15567c3b6af096ebd92c

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