NCT04033146

Optimizing Ankle Exoskeleton Assistance for Walking Across the Life Span

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 16 (actual)
• Sponsor: Georgia Institute of Technology · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The investigators seek to determine whether ankle exoskeletons can reduce metabolic energy expenditure during walking for users across the age-spectrum.

Detailed description

Older adults walk with greater metabolic rates than young adults. Growing evidence suggests that the greater older adult metabolic rates are related to the structural properties of their lower leg tissues. The tendons of the leg of older adults are more compliant than that of young adults. Accordingly, older adult leg tendons stretch more under a given load, such as during walking, causing their muscles to operate at shorter, less optimal lengths, and higher activity levels than the muscles of young adults - a less economical way to produces force. Thus, the investigators seek to examine whether wearing wearable robotic boots (i.e., ankle exoskeletons) could enable muscles to produce force more economically. By adding an exoskeleton in-parallel to the ankle, the investigators hypothesize that older adults will walk with lower whole-body metabolic rate than without the exoskeleton assistance. In this study, the investigators will have both young and older adult participants walk on a treadmill with a commercially available ankle exoskeleton set in multiple assistance modes. During these trials, the investigators will measure the metabolic cost of walking in young and older adults and also take many physiological and biomechanical measurements to help assess how exoskeletons work to reduce walking effort.

Conditions

• Aging

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Ankle Exoskeleton Assistance	The investigators will use ankle-exoskeletons to modulate the amount of mechanical power generated by the user's ankle joint. That is, participants will walk in a robotic device that either (a) adds a spring or (b) a motor in parallel with their calf muscles to help them generate a stronger propulsive push-off that could reduce the effort of walking.

Timeline

• Start date: 2020-02-04
• Primary completion: 2023-05-23
• Completion: 2023-05-23
• First posted: 2019-07-25
• Last updated: 2024-06-21
• Results posted: 2024-06-21

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States

Regulatory

• FDA-regulated device study