Leo Medrano, a PhD candidate in the Neurobionics Lab at the University of Michigan, tests out an ankle exoskeleton on a two-track treadmill. By allowing the user to directly manipulate the exoskeleton’s settings while testing it on a treadmill, preferences that are difficult to detect or measure, such as comfort, could be accounted for by the users themselves. Image credit: University of Michigan Robotics Institute
Leo Medrano, a PhD candidate in the Neurobionics Lab at the University of Michigan, tests out an ankle exoskeleton on a two-track treadmill. By allowing the user to directly manipulate the exoskeleton's settings while testing it on a treadmill, preferences that are difficult to detect or measure, such as comfort, could be accounted for by the users themselves. Image credit: University of Michigan Robotics Institute - Users who could adjust the timing, torque of an ankle exoskeleton typically found comfortable settings in under two minutes To transform human mobility, exoskeletons need to interact seamlessly with their user, providing the right level of assistance at the right time to cooperate with our muscles as we move. To help achieve this, University of Michigan researchers gave users direct control to customize the behavior of an ankle exoskeleton. Not only was the process faster than the conventional approach, in which an expert would decide the settings, but it may have incorporated preferences an expert would have missed. For instance, user height and weight, which are commonly used metrics for tuning exoskeletons and robotic prostheses, had no effect on preferred settings. "Instead of a one-size-fits-all level of power, or using measurements of muscle activity to customize an exoskeleton's behavior, this method uses active user feedback to shape the assistance a person receives,” said Kim Ingraham, first author of the study in Science Robotics, and a recent mechanical engineering Ph.D.
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