Design of a wearable upper-limb exoskeleton for activities assistance of daily living

Abstract

Most of the upper limb exoskeletons proposed in the literature are designed for rehabilitation, however, there are few developments for activities assistance of daily living. This paper presents a wearable upper limb exoskeleton for activities assistance of daily living with the feature of mobility. It provides five degrees-of-freedom (DOF) for each arm, where 3 DOF and 2 DOF are given to the shoulder and elbow, respectively. And it allows the wearer to keep freedom and mobility as usual after wearing the device. To conquer the strength-to-weight limitations of exoskeleton mobility, we introduced gravity balance method to reduce energy consumption and proposed a novel cable-driven joint mechanism to reduce its total weight to 4.2 kg. In order to verify the plausibility of joints design and its performance on motion assistance, joints tracking test and motion assistance test were carried out, respectively. Their results support that the proposed exoskeleton is feasible and efficacious.