EsoTech Wearables Ltd has been developing lightweight soft exosuits for lower-limb assistance.
The wearable suits use pneumatic artificial muscles to assist or resist movement to stimulate key leg muscles through programmable force control.
Using advanced textiles, the suits are tailorable like clothing and can be used to assist rehabilitation and athletic performance recovery as well as mitigating the effects of low gravity in space.
Electronically-controlled pneumatic actuators deliver programmable modulation of force and timing, enabling safe and repeatable stimulation of the lower limb muscles.
In space, the exosuit can act as a countermeasure against the negative effects of low gravity on astronauts. It is suitable for all mission phases, from pre-flight conditioning and training to augmentation during low gravity exposure, assistance or resistance during extravehicular and planetary activities, and post-flight rehabilitation and recovery.
The exosuits offer several novel features. Weighing just 1.4kg, the EsoMark 1 prototype has a fabric-based structure that embeds pneumatic artificial muscles along the main lower limb muscle groups to provide comfort, compliance, and natural movement. The suit can be customised to each user’s needs with the pneumatic muscles being electronically controlled to modulate force and timing to enable precise assistive and/or resistive activation.
EsoTech Wearables’ solution is also cost effective with a projected initial selling price of £6,000, which is far below the £14,000-100,000 for existing rigid or semi-rigid devices. You can find out more about this technology, here: