About the webinar:
Approximately 7 million workers in the United States work in jobs that primarily require lifting, lowering, and moving materials. This type of worker has the highest rates of injury among professions monitored by the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Injuries can either be caused by acute accidents, or over time by repetition and overuse. Regardless of the cause, these injuries are often debilitating for the worker and costly for the employer. Robotic automation has been increasingly used to replace workers, but these robots are expensive to purchase and require reorganization of processes and space before they can be implemented. Furthermore, many jobs still require the physical and mental flexibility of human beings. Therefore, there is still a need for technologies to reduce worker overuse injuries and accidents during manual lifting tasks. Occupational assistive devices are one possible solution to this problem. These devices can either be energetically passive or active. Passive devices don’t have motors – they are usually brace-type devices that support the user in awkward situations, or prevent dangerous movements, sometimes using springs to store-and-return energy or using dampers to dissipate energy. Active devices do have motors, which are often used to add supplemental torques to the user’s joints. In the HGN Lab for Bionic Engineering at the University of Utah, we develop powerful assistive exoskeletons and prostheses for rehabilitation and occupational applications. In this study, we used bilateral knee exoskeletons to assist the knees of healthy individuals who lifted and lowered a weighted box. Assistance from the knee exoskeletons reduced the biological knee torque and knee extensor muscle effort during lifting and lowering tasks. This technology has the potential to reduce overuse injuries in the workplace.
