Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A first-of-its-kind, soft, vest-like wearable designed by Harvard researchers could help stroke survivors and people living with ALS regain crucial upper limb movement. The researchers call the device a "wearable robot," which uses inflatable balloons positioned under a patient's arm that bulge and contract based on the desired movement. A combination of machine learning software and a separate physics-based model helps the robot interpret the patient's intended movements and personalize actions accordingly. In testing, the robot was able to correctly identify the user's intended shoulder movement 94.2 percent of the time.

Advances in wearable robotics challenge the traditional definition of human motor systems, as wearable robots redefine body structure, movement capability, and perception of their own bodies. While these devices can empower the wearer's motor performance, there is limited understanding of how wearer s update their perception of body images, especially images in dynamic movements, while learning to use these modern devices. This study aimed to fill the gap by examining the changes of body image as individuals learned to walk with a robotic prosthetic l eg over multi - day training. We measured gait performance and perceived body images via Selected Coefficient of Perceived Motion (SCoMo) after each training session. Based on human motor learning theory extended to wearer - robot systems, w e hypothesized that learning the perceived body image when walking with a robotic leg co - evolves with the actual gait improvement and becomes more certain and more accurate to the actual motion. Our result confirmed that motor learning improved both physical and perceived ga it pattern towards normal, indicating that via practice the wearers incorporated the robotic leg into their sensorimotor systems to enable wearer - robot movement coordination. However, a persistent discrepancy between perceived and actual motion remained, l ikely due to the absence of direct sensation and control of the prosthesis from wearers. Additionally, the perceptual overestimation at the later training sessions might limit further motor improvement. These findings suggest that enhancing the human sense of wearable robots and frequent calibrating perception of body image are essential for effective training with lower limb wearable robots and for developing more embodied assistive technologies.

We describe DANCE^2, an interactive dance performance in which audience members channel their collective agency into a dancer-robot duet by voting on the behavior of a wearable robot affixed to the dancer's body. At key moments during the performance, the audience is invited to either continue the choreography or override it, shaping the unfolding interaction through real-time collective input. While post-performance surveys revealed that participants felt their choices meaningfully influenced the performance, voting data across four public performances exhibited strikingly consistent patterns. This tension between what audience members do, what they feel, and what actually changes highlights a complex interplay between agentive behavior, the experience of agency, and power. We reflect on how choreography, interaction design, and the structure of the performance mediate this relationship, offering a live analogy for algorithmically curated digital systems where agency is felt, but not exercised.

Vlimb: A Wire-Driven Wearable Robot for Bodily Extension, Balancing Powerfulness and Reachability Shogo Sawaguchi 1, Temma Suzuki 1, Akihiro Miki 1, Kento Kawaharazuka 1, Sota Y uzaki 1, Shunnosuke Y oshimura 1, Y oshimoto Ribayashi 1, Kei Okada 1, Masayuki Inaba 1 Abstract -- Numerous wearable robots have been developed to meet the demands of physical assistance and entertainment. These wearable robots range from body-enhancing types that assist human arms and legs to body-extending types that have extra arms. This study focuses specifically on wearable robots of the latter category, aimed at bodily extension. However, they have not yet achieved the level of powerfulness and reachability equivalent to that of human limbs, limiting their application to entertainment and manipulation tasks involving lightweight objects. Therefore, in this study, we develop an body-extending wearable robot, Vlimb, which has enough powerfulness to lift a human and can perform manipulation. Leveraging the advantages of tendon-driven mechanisms, Vlimb incorporates a wire routing mechanism capable of accommodating both delicate manipulations and robust lifting tasks. Moreover, by introducing a passive ring structure to overcome the limited reachability inherent in tendon-driven mechanisms, Vlimb achieves both the powerfulness and reachability comparable to that of humans. This paper outlines the design methodology of Vlimb, conducts preliminary manipulation and lifting tasks, and verifies its effectiveness.

--- Wearable robots are designed to be worn on the human body. Taking advantage of their physical form, various applications for wearable robots are being considered. This study proposes a wearable robot worn on the abdomen and a new interaction with it. Our robot enables a variety of applications related to communication between the wearer and surrounding humans through visual and tactile feedback. The contributions of this research will be (1) the proposal of a novel wearable robot worn on the abdomen and (2) a new interaction with it.

Movement disorders impact muscle strength and mobility, and despite therapeutic efforts, many people with movement disorders have challenges functioning independently. Soft wearable robots, or exosuits, offer a promising solution for continuous daily support, however, commercially viable devices are not widely available. Here, we introduce a design framework for lower limb exosuits centered on a soft pneumatically driven fabric-based actuator. Our design consists of a novel multi-material textile sleeve that incorporates braided mesh and knit-elastic materials to realize hyper-bending actuators. The actuators incorporate 3D-printed self-sealing end caps that are attached to a semi-rigid human-robot interface to secure them to the body. We will demonstrate the effectiveness of our exosuit in generating enough force to assist during sit-to-stand transitions.

The collaborative robot market is flourishing as there is a trend towards simplification, modularity, and increased flexibility on the production line. But when humans and robots are collaborating in a shared environment, the safety of humans should be a priority. We introduce a novel wearable robotic system to enhance safety during Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The proposed wearable robot is designed to hold a fiducial marker and maintain its visibility to a motion capture system, which, in turn, localizes the user's hand with good accuracy and low latency and provides vibrotactile feedback to the user's wrist. The vibrotactile feedback guides the user's hand movement during collaborative tasks in order to increase safety and enhance collaboration efficiency. A user study was conducted to assess the recognition and discriminability of ten designed vibration patterns applied to the upper (dorsal) and the down (volar) parts of the user's wrist. The results show that the pattern recognition rate on the volar side was higher, with an average of 75.64% among all users. Four patterns with a high recognition rate were chosen to be incorporated into our system. A second experiment was carried out to evaluate users' response to the chosen patterns in real-world collaborative tasks. Results show that all participants responded to the patterns correctly, and the average response time for the patterns was between 0.24 and 2.41 seconds.

The current capabilities of robotic systems make human collaboration necessary to accomplish complex tasks effectively. In this work, we are introducing a framework to ensure safety in a human-robot collaborative environment. The system is composed of a wearable 2-DOF robot, a low-cost and easy-to-install tracking system, and a collision avoidance algorithm based on the Artificial Potential Field (APF). The wearable robot is designed to hold a fiducial marker and maintain its visibility to the tracking system, which, in turn, localizes the user's hand with good accuracy and low latency and provides haptic feedback to the user. The system is designed to enhance the performance of collaborative tasks while ensuring user safety. Three experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The first one evaluated the accuracy of the tracking system. The second experiment analyzed human-robot behavior during an imminent collision. The third experiment evaluated the system in a collaborative activity in a shared working environment. The results show that the implementation of the introduced system reduces the operation time by 16% and increases the average distance between the user's hand and the robot by 5 cm.

A small, bead-like magnet used in a new approach to measuring muscle position. Using a simple set of magnets, MIT researchers have come up with a sophisticated way to monitor muscle movements, which they hope will make it easier for people with amputations to control their prosthetic limbs. In a new pair of papers, the researchers demonstrated the accuracy and safety of their magnet-based system, which can track the length of muscles during movement. The studies, performed in animals, offer hope that this strategy could be used to help people with prosthetic devices control them in a way that more closely mimics natural limb movement. "These recent results demonstrate that this tool can be used outside the lab to track muscle movement during natural activity, and they also suggest that the magnetic implants are stable and biocompatible and that they don't cause discomfort," says Cameron Taylor, an MIT research scientist and co-lead author of both papers.

MADRID: Sporting a trendy brown bob, a humanoid robot named Erica chats to a man in front of stunned audience members in Madrid. She and others like her are a prime focus of robotic research, as their uncanny human form could be key to integrating such machines into our lives, said researchers gathered this week at the annual International Conference on Intelligent Robots. Can you please tell me more?" Erica, who is playing the role of an employer, asks the man. She may not understand the conversation, but she's been trained to detect key words and respond to them. A source of controversy due in part to fears for human employment, the presence of robots in our daily lives is nevertheless inevitable, engineers at the conference said. The trick to making them more palatable, they added, is to make them look and act more human so that we accept them into our lives more easily. In ageing societies, "robots will coexist with humans sooner or later", said Hiroko Kamide, a Japanese ...