Lightweight active back exosuit reduces muscular effort during an hour-long order picking task

Abstract

Occupational back exoskeletons and exosuits aim to reduce low back injuries in the workplace. For these technologies to be adopted, it is important that they provide biomechanical benefits to the wearer and do not disrupt job performance. To address this challenge, here we developed a lightweight, soft, active back exosuit that can autonomously control virtual impedance to apply differing assistance during lowering and lifting. This video highlight reviews some factors that were considered in the development of our soft active back exosuit actuation strategy. Despite noted limitations in our approach, we highlight how these decisions contributed to our results presented in Nature Communications Engineering that demonstrate: In usability tests, participants rated the exosuit as easy to learn and use and reported feeling confident while wearing it. In an experiment involving an hour long order picking task we demonstrated that the exosuit reduced peak and median muscle activations in the back by 18% and 20%, respectively. Despite the complexity of the movements required, such as walking, bending, and navigating around obstacles while lifting boxes from under a rack, our controller demonstrated impressive robustness with only 14 mistriggers out of 9600 lifts (0.1%). Collectively we hope this video review highlights how active exosuit technology can be iterated to provide it the potential to be a highly usable solution to aid warehouse workers in real-world settings.