Design and Preliminary Evaluation of a Passive Spine Exoskeleton

This paper presents a design of a passive spine exoskeleton which implements a push-pull external assistive strategy. The spine exoskeleton was designed for reducing the risk of back injury. It applies a pulling force on thoracic region and a pushing force on lumbar region during spine flexion/extension. The design was inspired by previous simulation work, where the results highly supported benefits of the push-pull strategy on reducing the back muscular efforts and bending moment for the sagittal spine flexion/extension. A passive physical prototype was designed and constructed to test the push-pull strategy on human subjects. Three subjects were able to repeat the identical dynamic spine flexion and extension tasks with the spine exoskeleton prototype. The surface electromyography showed a reduction of up to 24% at lumbar and 54% at thoracic level muscle for the human subjects wearing the exoskeleton suit to accomplish the same static tasks without any external assistance. The muscle force and intervertebral bending moment were estimated to be reduced by up to 479 N and 36 N . m, respectively.