Engineers in South Korea have created a soft, shirt-shaped exoskeleton to provide more mobility and independence for people with degenerative muscle conditions.
This exoskeleton costs thousands of dollars less than rigid, motorized models, and weighs less than 2 pounds, representing a revolutionary innovation in the field of robotics.
Developed by the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials, it consists of a shirt that is put on and taken off just like a cotton one, along with a modest nylon harness that holds the electrical components.
You can think of it as a portable set of muscles.
The fabric is woven from threads that are less than half the diameter of a human hair, but are made from a shape memory alloy. Contraction of the alloy to its “remember” shape mimics lifting an arm through the shoulder joint, and tests show it can relieve between 40% and 57% of the strain on the wearer’s musculature.
Myung Ha-yul is a 15-year-old student with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a diagnosis he received in elementary school. Myung requires a caregiver to help him with daily activities, and doctors had previously warned him and his parents that even combing his hair and brushing his teeth could become impossible as he grew older.
Myung participated in a series of tests conducted by Seoul National University Hospital and had excellent feedback on the exoskeleton shirt.
“It was amazing because it was light and easy to wear, just like a piece of clothing,” he told South Korea’s JoongAng Daily. “I could lift my arms with much less effort.”
On its own, shirt fabric can lift up to 34 pounds, and with the help of a human arm, it can restore the ability to perform many basic activities and movements.
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“The biggest achievement is that patients can put on and take off the shirt like clothing, while receiving active muscle support that leads to real functional improvement,” said Lee Woo-hyung, a professor of rehabilitation medicine at the hospital.
The development was funded by the Childhood Cancer and Rare Diseases Project, launched in May 2021 with a donation of 300 billion won ($204 million) from the family of late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee, the JoongAng Daily reported through a translation.
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