Wearable robots that can anticipate and react to users’ movement in real time could improve mobility assistance and rehabilitation tools.

Sometimes called exoskeletons, wearable robots are programmable body-worn devices designed to mechanically interact with the user. Their purpose is to assist or even substitute human motor function for people who have severe difficulty moving or walking.

Exoskeletons assist or substitute human motor function. Image source: EU/BIOMOT Project.The European Commission's BIOMOT project, completed in September 2016, has helped advance this emerging field by demonstrating that personalized computational models of the human body can effectively be used to control wearable exoskeletons. The project has identified ways of achieving improved flexibility and autonomous performance, which could assist in the use of wearable robots as mobility assistance and rehabilitation tools.

"An increasing number of researchers in the field of neurorehabilitation are interested in the potential of these robotic technologies for clinical rehabilitation following neurological diseases," says BIOMOT project coordinator Dr. Juan Moreno, of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research. "One reason is that these systems can be optimized to deliver diverse therapeutic interventions at specific points of recuperation or care."

However, a number of factors have limited the widespread market adoption of these devices. Moreno and his team identified the need for wearable equipment to be more compact and lightweight and better able to anticipate and detect the intended movements of the wearer.

In addition, robots need to become more versatile and adaptable to aid people in a variety of different situations—walking on uneven ground, for example, or approaching an obstacle.

To address these challenges, the project developed robots with real-time adaptability and flexibility by increasing the symbiosis between the robot and the user through dynamic sensorimotor interactions. A hierarchical approach to these interactions was taken, allowing the project team to apply different layers for different purposes. This means, in effect, that an exoskeleton can be personalized.

Following theoretical and practical work, the project team tested prototype exoskeletons with volunteers. A key technical challenge was combining a robust and open architecture with a novel wearable robotic system that can gather signals from human activity.

"We succeeded in investigating for the first time the potential of automatically controlling human-robot interactions in order to enhance user compliance to a motor task," says Moreno. "Our research with healthy humans showed such positive and promising results that we are keen to continue validation with both stroke and spinal cord injury patients."