Soft Robotics for Fall Mitigation: Preliminary Design and Evaluation of a Wearable System using Continuum Robots

Falls can lead to serious consequences such as bone fractures or even death. Various fall protection devices such as mobile walkers, wearable airbags and lower-limb wearable robots have been developed to provide balance support or mitigate the damage from a fall. While these devices have shown promising results, critical drawbacks still exist. Most importantly, current devices can only mitigate the damage to a fall upon occurrence, but cannot take proactive action to prevent it. In this paper, we report on the design and evaluation of a novel fall prevention device using two compliant continuum robots. These two robots, which are pneumatically actuated, will be mounted to the back of a human user and deployed to grasp nearby static objects in the early stages of a fall, detected using onboard sensors. Preliminary fall experiments on a mannequin in forward, backward, and lateral directions demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed design.