Wearable soft sensing suit for human gait measurement

Abstract

Wearable robots based on soft materials will augment mobility and performance of the host without restricting natural kinematics. Such wearable robots will need soft sensors to monitor the movement of the wearer and robot outside the lab. Until now wearable soft sensors have not demonstrated significant mechanical robustness nor been systematically characterized for human motion studies of walking and running. Here, we present the design and systematic characterization of a soft sensing suit for monitoring hip, knee, and ankle sagittal plane joint angles. We used hyper-elastic strain sensors based on microchannels of liquid metal embedded within elastomer, but refined their design with the use of discretized stiffness gradients to improve mechanical durability. We found that these robust sensors could stretch up to 396% of their original lengths, would restrict the wearer by less than 0.17% of any given joint’s torque, had gauge factor sensitivities of greater than 2.2, and exhibited less than 2% change in electromechanical specifications through 1500 cycles of loading–unloading. We also evaluated the accuracy and variability of the soft sensing suit by comparing it with joint angle data obtained through optical motion capture. The sensing suit had root mean square (RMS) errors of less than 5° for a walking speed of 0.89 m/s and reached a maximum RMS error of 15° for a running speed of 2.7 m/s. Despite the deviation of absolute measure, the relative repeatability of the sensing suit’s joint angle measurements were statistically equivalent to that of optical motion capture at all speeds. We anticipate that wearable soft sensing will also have applications beyond wearable robotics, such as in medical diagnostics and in human–computer interaction.