Harvard Wyss Institute researchers have been working on a soft exosuit with DARPA’s financial help for years. While they were able to present a proof of concept in 2016, it’s only now that they’ve found out just how much the suit can actually help its wearer. According to a new study published in Science Robotics , Harvard’s exosuit reduces the energy a user needs to exert while walking by 23 percent. It does that by providing assistive force to the ankle at the perfect moment when you take another step. Team leader Conor Walsh said that’s the highest percentage of reduction in energy use observed with an exosuit: “In a test group of seven healthy wearers, we clearly saw that the more assistance provided to the ankle joints, the more energy the wearers could save with a maximum reduction of almost 23% compared to walking with the exosuit powered-off. To our knowledge, this is the highest relative reduction in energy expenditure observed to date with a tethered exoskeleton or exosuit.” Of course, assistive force wouldn’t be as helpful without an effective design. As Wired explains, the muscles and tendons from the hip to the knee need to work together in stabilizing the leg to achieve an efficient stride. So the researchers couldn’t stop with something that only covers the ankles — they had to use garters to connect the ankle straps to a hip girdle. The result is the exosuit’s current form, which you can see below. That said, the researchers admit that they need to conduct follow-up tests. For one, they had the subjects offload the exosuit’s cable-based actuation, electronics and battery units before conducting the experiment. Those make up an additional 17-plus pounds that would have changed the wearers’ situation. Further, they found that the subjects’ gaits changed depending on how much assistive force they provided, which was between 10 to 38 percent of the ankle force needed to take a step. They still need to explore the possibility that the reduction in energy is a result of the subjects’ change in gait rather than the assistive force itself. In the future, Harvard’s exosuit could help the elderly and patients suffering from Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy and other conditions to walk well on their own. As you can guess from that DARPA funding, though, it also has a potential military application: the agency hopes it can help soldiers carry heavy supplies far longer than they’d normally be able to. [Image credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University] Via: Wired , New Scientist Source: Harvard’s Wyss Institute
Visit site:
Harvard’s soft exosuit makes walking 23 percent easier
wiredmikey writes: Security researchers have a uncovered a Mac OS based espionage malware they have named “Quimitchin.” The malware is what they consider to be “the first Mac malware of 2017, ” which appears to be a classic espionage tool. While it has some old code and appears to have existed undetected for some time, it works. It was discovered when an IT admin noticed unusual traffic coming from a particular Mac, and has been seen infecting Macs at biomedical facilities. From SecurityWeek.com: “Quimitchin comprises just two files: a .plist file that simply keeps the .client running at all times, and the .client file containing the payload. The latter is a ‘minified and obfuscated’ perl script that is more novel in design. It combines three components, Thomas Reed, director of Mac offerings at Malwarebytes and author of the blog post told SecurityWeek: ‘a Mac binary, another perl script and a Java class tacked on at the end in the __DATA__ section of the main perl script. The script extracts these, writes them to /tmp/ and executes them.’ Its primary purpose seems to be screen captures and webcam access, making it a classic espionage tool. Somewhat surprisingly the code uses antique system calls. ‘These are some truly ancient functions, as far as the tech world is concerned, dating back to pre-OS X days, ‘ he wrote in the blog post. ‘In addition, the binary also includes the open source libjpeg code, which was last updated in 1998.’ The script also contains Linux shell commands. Running the malware on a Linux machine, Malwarebytes ‘found that — with the exception of the Mach-O binary — everything ran just fine.’ It is possible that there is a specific Linux variant of the malware in existence — but the researchers have not been able to find one. It did find two Windows executable files, courtesy of VirusTotal, that communicated with the same CC server. One of them even used the same libjpeg library, which hasn’t been updated since 1998, as that used by Quimitchin.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
