MusculoSkeletal Expansion

Descripción del proyecto

Tecnología de asistencia destinada a la debilidad muscular

Muchas personas con debilidad muscular grave en las extremidades superiores por trastornos neurológicos tienen dificultades para encontrar tecnologías de asistencia eficaces. Las soluciones actuales, como los exoesqueletos portátiles, resultan prometedoras, pero se enfrentan a importantes obstáculos, como la ineficacia, la escasa capacidad de control y la poca fiabilidad de las conexiones con el usuario. En este contexto, el proyecto MUSE, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, pretende desarrollar músculos externos blandos, o exomúsculos, que se integren a la perfección con los movimientos naturales de los usuarios. Gracias al uso de actuadores neumáticos avanzados y técnicas de osteointegración, el equipo de MUSE ofrece una conexión fiable entre el dispositivo y el cuerpo, lo cual permite mejorar el control del movimiento a través de la retroalimentación sensorial. El planteamiento no solo pretende mejorar la vida diaria de las personas con debilidad muscular, sino que también podría allanar el camino a interacciones más sofisticadas entre humanos y máquinas.

Objetivo

People that suffer from severe muscle weakness of the (upper) limb following neurological disorders still struggle to find assistive technologies able to help them in their daily life. The most advanced technologies consist of wearable exoskeletons, either rigid or soft, that promise to support the wearer during daily living. Despite their great potential, the widespread adoption of exoskeletons where they are most needed – i.e. for continuous daily home assistance – is prevented by several flaws: limited efficiency, controllability, and lack of reliable ways to connect them to the user. MUSE (MusculoSkeletal Expansion) abandons the paradigm of wearing an exoskeleton to develop and clinically assess soft external muscles (exomuscles) intimately connected and naturally controlled by the user. The core objective is to develop innovative efficient exomuscles to support people with severe muscle weakness. With my solid experience in soft robotics and innovative materials, I will develop them by combining the extreme portability of pneumatic actuators made of textiles with the energy efficiency and promptness of non-linear elastic structures. They will be reliably connected to the user through fixtures implanted on the bones, which will grant the excellent mechanical stability of osseointegration, widely adopted in dental prosthetics and increasingly explored in limb prosthetics, but still unexplored in exoskeletons. This approach will unlock the potential of eliciting osseoperception, i.e. sensory feedback – necessary to control motion – through bone conduction. If successful, MUSE will benefit all those in need of sensorimotor augmentation, as it can be extended to all kinds of exoskeletons (from upper to lower limbs, from assistive to augmenting devices). Moreover, since MUSE connects the inner body to the external world, it may be the cornerstone to build a bidirectional gateway between them, bridging the human and the machine to a more and more intimate level.