Using a muscle suit in nursing care to prevent caregivers' backache

In recent years, patients and caregivers at nursing homes have expected the development of wearable robots that assist the muscles of their wearer hoping that such devices would address the physical difficulties experienced by caregivers and the psychological problems experienced by patients as a result of them. In this study, we use the muscle suit that is under development to experimentally examine its application not only to work that requires temporary use of large muscles (i.e., transfer assistance), but also to work that requires repetitive use of comparatively small muscles. Specifically, we focus on changing sheets, which is one of the tasks that often gives rise to complaints from workers of heavy physical loads, and we evaluate the capacity of the muscle suit to mitigate the difficulty of the task by ElectroMyoGraphy (EMG).