Stanford Exoskeleton Released Into the "Wild"
The Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory’s exoskeleton emulators — lab-based robotic devices that help wearers walk and run faster with less effort — will be released into the real world with the first untethered exoskeleton.
“This exoskeleton personalizes assistance as people walk normally through the real world,” said Steve Collins , associate professor of mechanical engineering who leads the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory. “And it resulted in exceptional improvements in walking speed and energy economy.”
Transcript
00:00:01 in this project we built a portable exoskeleton so a device that is like a motorized Boot and helps you to walk and it's the first device that provides benefits in the real world so that means as you're walking in your daily life we can actually make it require less effort and help you walk faster we've long known that individualizing assistance is needed to maximize
00:00:24 benefits of these kinds of devices because everyone is complex and unique the previous approaches we've used for individualization required these expensive immobile equipment that were in the laboratory setting and what we found is a way to perform that optimization using only these cheap wearable sensors walking with the exoskeletons quite literally feels like
00:00:47 you have an extra spring in your step essentially every time my foot's about to lift off the ground I can feel the exoskeletons give me a little push up and forward just really making that next step so much easier our device learns how to personalize assistance for each person as they walk and it takes only an hour which is about how much you walk every day so very quickly we can
00:01:05 understand what is the best form of assistance for you and help you to receive the best benefits possible optimize assistance allowed people to walk nine percent faster with 17 percent less energy expended per distance traveled and these are the largest improvements in speed and energy economy for any exoskeleton to date we also need to test on a treadmill so we could
00:01:27 compare to other devices we found that the improvements in energy economy were about twice those of the best prior devices because walking is something we're so used to doing naturally without exoskeletons the first time you put an exoskeleton on can be a bit of an adjustment but honestly within the first like 15 minutes of walking it starts to
00:01:44 feel quite natural you get used to that sort of extra spring in your step the next steps for this would be trying this device in similar approaches to it with these populations who need Mobility assistance so older adults for example are people with muscle weakness to try and understand how it can improve their daily life and see if they use it at home what does that look like for them
00:02:05 foreign