Using form-fitting, fabric-based designs that are lightweight and non-restrictive, the Wyss Institute's soft exosuit uses compact, powerful actuators packaged in a belt to provide assistance to the wearer's legs in a physiologically relevant manner. These enhanced movements have the potential to assist wearers in walking with greater stability and metabolic efficiency, which could prevent injury and reduce fatigue.
Most currently-marketed exoskeletons are rigid systems providing structural support and large assistance to patients with extremely severe movement disabilities, for example due to spinal cord injuries. For many stroke, MS, and elderly patients who can move partially on their own, the assistive and elegant movements of the lighter weight, flexible, soft exosuit could be used to overcome mobility limitations in their lower extremities. Currently in the United States, there are an estimated 3 million stroke patients and 400,000 MS patients who are suffering from limited mobility due to lower limb disabilities.
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"The soft exosuit is a wonderful example of how understanding how living systems work - in this case the movement and control of the human body - can inspire design of an innovative wearable robotic technology that has the potential to change the future of medicine. It is also tremendously gratifying to see how this collaboration between Rewalk Robotics and Conor Walsh's lab has developed and been nurtured at the Wyss Institute, given our focus on translating technologies from the laboratory and into the marketplace," said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who is the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children's Hospital, and also Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Harvard's Office of Technology Development worked with the Wyss Institute to structure this collaboration with ReWalk, which includes a license for intellectual property and funding for the continued development at the Institute, towards bringing this new wearable therapeutic device into the marketplace. Additional funding for the Wyss Institute's exosuit came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Warrior Web program, which seeks to develop technologies to mitigate musculoskeletal injuries among military Service members while improving performance.
