Using Exoskeletons To Increase Mobility
Bouvé/MIE Assistant Professor Max Shepherd is leading a team of graduate students, including Fatima Tourk, PhD’27, mechanical engineering, to create a battery-powered exoskeleton that is intended to assist people with mobility issues and enable complex movements without causing discomfort. Supporting this work, Shepherd co-authored “Task-Agnostic Exoskeleton Control via Biological Joint Moment Estimation,” on a new lower-limb exoskeleton, which was published in Nature.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was written by Ian Thomsen. Main photo: Max Shepherd, assistant professor, works on an exoskeleton with graduate student Divyansh Gupta in Richards Hall on Northeastern’s Boston campus. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
How Northeastern researchers are using exoskeletons and futuristic devices for everyday mobility
Fatima Tourk wears one thick velcro belt around her waist and another around her right upper leg as she walks the whirring treadmill at a relaxed, comfortable speed.
But the exercise is even easier than it appears. For Tourk is receiving a boost to her right hip from a battery-powered exoskeleton that she has helped create.
“It feels pretty natural,” says Tourk, a Northeastern University PhD candidate in mechanical engineering. “You can definitely feel it lifting your leg up a little bit. I would say it’s pretty comfortable to walk.”
Tourk is among the graduate students assisting in the development of exoskeletons at Northeastern’s Shepherd Lab, where professor Max Shepherd leads efforts to design controllers for wearable robotics.
“The long-term vision is to have what we call ‘partial-assist exoskeletons’ that provide an assistive force to the body to help make it easier to walk,” says Shepherd, an assistant professor of physical therapy, human movement and rehabilitation sciences whose lab work is funded by a National Science Foundation grant. “This would be most beneficial for patients who have different mobility challenges. You can imagine kids with cerebral palsy or people who have had a stroke could put on this device. They could walk more efficiently, faster and more symmetrically, maybe with a lower hazard of tripping and falling.”
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Fatima Tourk, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering, says the lab’s hip exoskeleton “feels pretty natural.” Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
It’s a competitive field with the potential of benefiting millions of patients who struggle with everyday movement. Companies and academic researchers—including Shepherd and his Northeastern colleague Seungmoon Song, an assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering who directs the NeuMove Lab—are working in concert to resolve the many issues facing this futuristic technology.
“There are a lot of fundamental issues that academia needs to solve,” Shepherd says of his ongoing exoskeleton research. Unlike companies competing in the marketplace, he adds, “We don’t have to sell this in the next couple years. So we can focus deeply on these really tough questions. The timeline for us solving them is 10 years away.”
Two of the biggest issues are wearability and versatility.
“They are big, they’re heavy, they’re clunky, they’re hard to put on and take off,” Shepherd says of the current prototypes. “And so we’re developing new robotic designs that are lightweight and strike certain trade-offs that we think are particularly important for getting out of the lab.”
Shepherd has a vision for the future of exoskeletons.
“Eventually it will look halfway between Iron Man and clothing, with the goal being as many parts are made of fabric or foams, rubbers and plastics,” Shepherd says. “But we have found that we almost certainly need some amount of rigid structure in order to help transmit the exoskeleton forces to the body. And so one of the goals is to have as minimal rigid componentry as possible.”
The second issue involves the complexity of movement. Developing an exoskeleton that helps someone walk in a straight line isn’t practical. Walking comprises all kinds of movements that deviate from that straight line—which means an exoskeleton needs to anticipate, discern and react to the ever-changing needs of its wearer.
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