Presentation of textile pneumatic muscle prototypes applied in an upper limb active suit experimental model

Abstract

This paper presents some prototypes of textile pneumatic muscles developed at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (DIMEAS) of the Politecnico di Torino. As an application, they are intended to be included in an ‘active suit’ useful for upper limb rehabilitation. They were realized with textile and soft materials in order to guarantee suitable wearability, confort, low weight, small dimensions as required to actuators used in active suits. This paper illustrated the experimental tests carried on these pneumatic muscles prototypes, a theoretical model from literature here applied to these muscles in order to calculate their stiffness, a preliminary active suit prototype for upper limbs rehabilitation purpose. The results obtained, both in terms of contraction and force developed with these prototypes, are highly satisfactory and the preliminary prototype of active suit realized for upper limbs works properly.

Keywords:

• Active suits for upper limbs
• soft rehabilitation devices for upper limbs
• innovative textile pneumatic muscles
• soft wearable devices

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank engineers E. Rulfi, D. Contigiani and F. Bracco, L. Genovese for their help with this study.