A Study on Evaluating Wearing Mobility of Wearable Robot Mechanisms

Wearable robots recently become a hopeful technology for support and assist of human activity in many fields. A major issue discussed in this research field to this date is limb mobility of a person wearing a wearable robot. It is considered that the mobility receives influence from factors such as alignment of a wearable robot mechanism on human limbs, control of the robot, mechanical design of the mechanism etc. This paper considers two mechanical designs of the mechanism for motion support of a human elbow joint, and compare those mobility based on relative motion between a human arm and the mechanism, under an assumption that the mechanism does not receive special care for its alignment on a human arm. The comparison of the mobility obtained from measured data of persons wearing the mechanism does not statistically exhibit significant difference between the mechanical designs, however, it also brings up some issues for future study.