Development and evaluation of a close-fitting assistive suit for back and arm muscle – e.Z.UP® –

This paper proposes a close-fitting assistive suit, called e.z.UP^R○, with a passive actuation mechanism composed of an adjustable structure. The suit can adequately assist the back and arm muscles of a user with the proposed layout of an arm assistive belt and a two-layer structure, respectively. With its lightweight characteristic (i.e., weighing 0.75 kg only), the proposed suit is portable and easy to wear without additional burden. By using the averaged Japanese body data, a simulation was conducted based on a human body model wearing our proposed suit to evaluate the layout of the arm assistive belt. The simulation results prove that the proposed suit can adequately assist the user’s arm muscles based on the user’s motion. An experiment involving the measurement of muscle activities is also implemented with seven young subjects and seven middle-aged subjects to evaluate the arm assistive belt and the two-layer structure. The experimental results reveal that the proposed suit can successfully and appropriately assist both the arm and back muscles simultaneously.