An EMG-Driven Weight Support System with Pneumatic Artificial

Muscle.
Paper summary.
Abstract. 10 mins
Background:
Aim: introduce biosignal-based vertical weight support system: PAM + EMG
Methods:
+ knee and ankle torques converted to vertical force reference signal.
four different experimental conditions:
1) normal two-leg squat
2) one-leg squat without the assist system.
3) one-leg squat with EMG-based weight support.
4) one-leg squat with constant force support
Results and Conclusion:
The EMG magnitude with proposed weight support system was much closer to that normal two-leg
squat.
Results.

Fig. 2. Torque tracking performance of PAM-based weight support system with frequencies of 0.1,
0.25, and 0.5 Hz. A thirty-kilogram weight was attached to the bottom of the support system.
 Fig. 3. Control strategy of the weight support system. Muscle forces are estimated from full-wave
rectied and bandpass-ltered EMG signals. Joint torque is derived from the estimated muscle
force by using the tendon-pulley model. Then, the derived torque is converted to desired assist force
fpam for PAM by taking measured joint angles into account.

Fig. 4. EMG electrode and goniometer placements.

Fig. 5. Torque estimation performances. The estimated (a) knee and (b) ankle joint torques from
EMG signals are indicated by solid lines. Target joint torque proles derived from joint angle
trajectory with using oating base inverse dynamics model are plotted by dashed lines. The
estimation performances are evaluated with using a test data set that is not used for nding the
parameters of the tendon-pulley model in (7).