There is a saying: comfortable posture is usually bad posture. A human feels comfortable and consumes less energy when holding the object on the floor by flexing his back than bending leg, which is vulnerable to back injuries, because of characteristics of human body design. We have developed a soft wearable device that can reconfigure these contradictory human body systems to make to feel the correct posture comfortable and bad posture uncomfortable. A representative posture correction functions of this device is to correct the wearer’s habit to use a lifting technique called squat instead of the stoop and to induce wearer to keep his knee behind the toes in the process of bending the legs. Experiments with varying lift posture showed that this device interfered with the stoop motion but assisted the squat motion. Also, we proved that the muscular force assistive effect of the device increased in knee backed posture. In repetitive lift experiment, EMG values of spinal erector, biceps femoris, and rectus femoris decreased by 14.0%, 17.0%, and 14.3% respectively when taking squat motion with wearing the device. Also, in this case, the metabolic energy cost decreased by 29.5% and the heart rate decreased by 13.6%, proving that the device is effective in reducing fatigue of the worker.

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Keywords : #Assistive