Equivalent Weight: Connecting Exoskeleton Effectiveness with Ergonomic Risk during Manual Material Handling.

Occupational exoskeletons are becoming a concrete solution to mitigate work-related musculoskeletal disorders associated with manual material handling activities. The rationale behind this study is to search for common ground for exoskeleton evaluators to engage in dialogue with corporate Health & Safety professionals while integrating exoskeletons with their workers. This study suggests an innovative interpretation of the effect of a lower-back assistive exoskeleton and related performances that are built on the benefit delivered through reduced activation of the erector spinae musculature.

Acceleration-based Assistive Strategy to Control a Back-support Exoskeleton for Load Handling: Preliminary Evaluation.

Industrial active exoskeletons have recently achieved considerable interest, due to their intrinsic versatility compared to passive devices. To achieve this versatility, an important open challenge is the design of appropriate control strategies to automatically modulate the physical assistance according to the activity the user is performing.This work focuses on active back-support exoskeletons.

Assessment of an On-board Classifier for Activity Recognition on an Active Back-Support Exoskeleton.

Despite the growing interest, the adoption of industrial exoskeletons may still be held back by technical limitations. To enhance versatility and promote adoption, one aspect of interest could be represented by the potential of active and quasi-passive devices to automatically distinguish different activities and adjust their assistive profiles accordingly. This contribution focuses on an active back-support exoskeleton and extends previous work proposing the use of a Support Vector Machine to classify walking, bending and standing.

Plasticity of human dedifferentiated adipocytes toward endothelial cells.

The process of cellular differentiation in terminally differentiated cells is thought to be irreversible, and these cells are thought to be incapable of differentiating into distinct cell lineages. Our previous study showed that mature adipocytes represent an alternative source of mesenchymal stem cells. Here, results showed the capacity of mature adipocytes to differentiate into endothelial-like cells, using the ability of these cells to revert into an immature phase without any relievable chromosomal alterations.