P-49

Due to the increase of life expectancy, the number of elderly people with mild to moderate disability increases as well. Furthermore younger and more vital people can also have different degrees of mobility impairment; think of congenital or chronical conditions that can lead to mobility impairment, as well as the result of an injury.

There are a variety of different assistive devices, such as exoskeletons, to help people with limitations in independent movement of their legs. These assistive aids, currently available, are bulky, fairly inflexible and impractical in daily use. Moreover, these exoskeletons are very expensive and do not encourage or support the activation of the legs, since they completely take over their function.

An international multidisciplinary consortium of researchers have therefore set out to develop, a novel solution: a wearable, intelligent soft clothing system, named XoSoft (www.xosoft.eu). Among this consortium are the chairs Lightweight Structures, Smart Functional Materials and Ambient Intelligence of Saxion, and Roessingh Research and Development. This soft, modular lower limb exoskeleton for the elderly and disabled will help increase mobility and thus greatly improve health and quality of life.

The chair LS is developing passive stiffening integrated directly into the garment to prevent hyperextension of the knee joint and create anchor points for the smart actuation of the soft exoskeleton. The researchers from SFM are responsible for the development of the garment and the integration of all the ‘smart’ actuation and sensing into the garment. Within the AmI research group, together with RRD, a monitoring system is developed to provide feedback to the different user groups of XoSoft. This feedback system assists patients with maintaining their balance through vibro-tactile feedback and improves the insight of clinicians and policy makers.