Participation at RehabWeek 2023 (Singapore) resulted from the collaboration between the BIOMEC group (CREB-UPC) and the Neural Rehabilitation Group (CSIC)

The work resulted from the collaboration between BIOMEC (CREB-UPC), a research group of the Mechanical Engineering Department at UPC, and the Neural Rehabilitation Group (NRG), a research group of the Cajal Institute (CSIC) was presented at the last RehabWeek 2023 conference, held in Singapore, last September 2023. The work presented the results of one of the first studies on physical human-exoskeleton interaction (pHEI) in which a lightweight wearable knee exoskeleton and an instrumented robotic leg replica of a human leg were used to measure the interaction forces between the robotic leg and the assistive device while performing flexion extension movements. The exoskeleton was developed entirely at BIOMEC by Dr. Massimo Cenciarini and Daniel Clos Costa, both members of the ME Dept., while the robotic leg replica resulted from an EU funded project in which the NRG was a partner.  This study demonstrates the ability of the proposed methodology to objectively benchmark different aspects of pHEI, and to accelerate the iterative development of new devices prior to human testing.

The conference proceedings publication that resulted from this work can be found in the UPC Commons repository.

The exoskeleton prototype used in this work was developed with funding received from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 801342 (Tecniospring INDUSTRY) and the Government of Catalonia’s Agency for Business Competitiveness (ACCIÓ). This collaboration was supported by the project EXOSAFE, awarded by the COVR European Project under grant agreement No. 779966.