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Wearable tails help elderly folks keep their balance

Boing Boing·Rob Beschizza·about 1 month ago
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The Arque tail, from 2019 About 25 million years after our ancestors traded theirs for an upright stance, a research team at Keio University Graduate School of Media Design gave our long-lost tails a comeback tour. The prototype, dubbed Arque, was a meter-long wearable robot designed to help elderly users with balance problems . For most vertebrate animals, tail plays an important role for their body, providing variant functions to expand their mobility. In this work, Arque, we propose an artificial biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic tail to allow us to alter our body momentum for assistive and haptic feedback applications. The pitch is biomimicry . Cheetahs flick their tails to corner at full sprint. Monkeys use theirs as a counterweight in the canopy. Arque, the Keio team says, can do the same for us when crossing a slick kitchen floor. When the wearer leans one way, the tail swings the other, acting as a pendulum to nudge the body's center of mass back over its feet.…

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