VOICE OVER: Exoskeletons - devices designed to augment and enhance
mobility are fast becoming a reality.
PATRICK SLADE: An exoskeleton is really beneficial because it allows us to improve
certain aspects of our mobility. So for example if we want to walk with less effort,
or walk more quickly, or overcome uh perhaps mobility disorder which limits our movements.
VO: But there are challenges to overcome if they are going
to leave the lab and enter our everyday lives.
PATRICK: It's actually quite difficult to make walking easier or to reduce knee pain
or to do these things that we care about because,
when we walk around every day we walk in short bouts of walking, we change speeds,
we're not walking at a on a treadmill at a fixed speed like we do in the lab.
VO: Now, researchers think they’ve made a big step forward,
with a smart exoskeleton that can learn, as you walk.
PATRICK: So what we've built is an ankle exoskeleton. So this is as you can see a
shoe with a motorised unit, sort of like a motorised boot and it applies assistance
as you're walking, so as you walk it can apply assistance with push off,
and this can both make walking easier, so require less effort and increase walking speed.
VO: To provide the most benefit, exoskeletons need to be carefully personalised to each user.
PATRICK: In the past we've done this in the lab using a big machine which measures your
breathing your oxygen and your carbon dioxide, to understand your energy expenditure and it's
this huge lab-based equipment and it takes hours to run these experiments
so it's not really feasible uh to do on devices that you might purchase and wear,
and so one really cool part of this project is we figured out how
to actually personalise assistance for each person as they're walking in everyday life.
VO: When a user first puts on the device,
the exoskeleton will start to monitor the way they move.
PATRICK: So as they're walking in short bouts, starting, stopping,
and also changing speed the device is able to collect data based on how
they're moving and figure out what's the best way to assist each person.
VO: There are various ways that the exoskeleton can tweak its support,
from the timing of a boost to a step, to the torque or angle of the assistance.
But to work out which intervention may be most helpful - it runs a model,
trained on lab data, which predicts metabolic benefits.
This then allows the exoskeleton to try different forms of assistance - ranking
and comparing options until it’s optimised for the best results.
PATRICK: And this doubles the benefits compared to a generic non-personalised controller.
VO: And because the system is designed to work in the real world, Patrick and his team
wanted to really put it through its paces. So they sent subjects out onto their university
campus wearing the exoskeleton and prompted them to walk in a variety of different ways…
EXPERIMENT AUDIO: Walk as if you're walking across the street.
Walk as if you're walking home with a group of friends at night.
Walk as if you're walking home after a really bad day.
VO: Participants walked around 9% faster, and used 17% less energy while wearing the boots compared
to normal shoes. Patrick says this optimisation technique could have an impact across robotics
PATRICK: The really exciting science takeaway is that we've developed a method for
robots to optimise, as humans wear them during everyday life, and so this can,
this idea and these approaches can be broadly applied to many different kinds of robotic
devices beyond just exoskeletons, where you have a human and a robot working together,
and so this could be an exciting uh chance to see developments in for example human
robot worker collaboration or other aspects of sort of smart home systems.
VO: And he hopes that further research will allow the ankle
exoskeleton to help those who need it most.
PATRICK: We've never seen a device that you can put on and take outside and move how you
normally do, starting, stopping and changing speeds, and actually see mobility benefits,
and so that's really exciting because in the lab these devices have been very promising and
there's been decades of research, and now we're seeing that these can be translated to perhaps
commercial products that you can buy and wear and you know improve your mobility and be able
to do things that you otherwise couldn't do. We're excited and starting to study
you know how we can apply these same ideas and devices to older adults for example to
help make walking easier and increase speed of walking. And how specific populations who have
other challenges beyond just walking effort and walking speed for example knee pain, we can try
to improve other metrics using these same sorts of personalisations approaches in the real world.