PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Artificial muscles for tremor suppression

Artificial muscles for tremor suppression
2025-03-06
(Press-News.org) Key points:

Slim and lightweight HASEL artificial muscles effectively suppress human tremor Reproduction of patient recordings of tremor episodes in a robotic platform/mechanical patient Computer simulation of tremor arm validates that forces are sufficient for practical applications Avoiding time consuming clinical testing in early stages of technology development  

Stuttgart/Tübingen – It is estimated that around 80 million people worldwide live with a tremor. For example, those who live with Parkinson's disease. The involuntary periodic movements sometimes strongly affect how patients are able to perform daily activities, such as drinking from a glass or writing. Wearable soft robotic devices offer a potential solution to suppress such tremors. However, existing prototypes are not yet sophisticated enough to provide a real remedy.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS), the University of Tübingen, and the University of Stuttgart under the Bionic Intelligence Tübingen Stuttgart (BITS) collaboration want to change this. The team equipped a biorobotic arm with two strands of artificial muscles strapped along the forearm. As can be seen in this video, the biorobotic arm – here dubbed the mechanical patient – simulates a tremor. Several real tremors were recorded and projected onto the biorobotic arm which then mirrors how each patient shakes the wrist and hand. However, once the tremor suppression is activated, the lightweight artificial muscles, which are made of electro-hydraulic actuators, contract and relax in such a way as to compensate for the back-and-forth movement. Now, the tremor can hardly be felt or seen.

With this arm, the team wants to achieve two goals: First, the team sees their biorobotic arm as a platform for other scientists in the field to test new ideas in assistive exoskeleton technology. Together with their biomechanical computer simulations, developers can quickly validate how well their soft artificial muscles perform, thereby avoiding time-consuming and costly clinical testing on real patients – which in some countries is not even legally possible.

Furthermore, the arm serves as a test bed for the artificial muscles the Robotic Materials Department at MPI-IS is well known for in the scientific community. Over the years, these so-called HASELs have been fine-tuned and improved. It is the team’s vision for HASELs to one day become the building blocks of an assistive wearable device that tremor patients can comfortably wear to be able to better cope with everyday tasks such as holding a cup.

”We see a great potential for our muscles to become the building blocks of a garment one can wear very discreetly so that others don't even realize the person suffers from a tremor,” says Alona Shagan Shomron, a postdoc in the Robotic Materials Department at MPI-IS and first author of a research paper that was published in the journal “Device”. “We showed that our artificial muscles, which are based on the HASEL technology, are fast and strong enough for a large range of tremors in the wrist. This shows the great potential of a HASEL-based wearable assistive device for individuals living with a tremor,” Shagan adds.

“With the combination of mechanical patient and biomechanical model we can measure if any tested artificial muscles are good enough to suppress all tremors, even very strong ones. So if we ever created a wearable device, we could adjust it to respond individually to each tremor,” Daniel Häufle adds. He is a professor at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University of Tübingen. Among other things, he created the computer simulation and collected the tremor data from patients.

“The mechanical patient allows us to test the potential of new technologies very early in the development, without the need for expensive and time-consuming clinical testing on real patients”, says Syn Schmitt, Professor for Computational Biophysics and Biorobotics at the University of Stuttgart. “A lot of good ideas are often not further pursued, as clinical testing is expensive and time-consuming and hard to fund at very early stages of technology development. Our mechanical patient is the solution which allows us to test the potential very early in the development.”

“Robotics has great potential for healthcare applications. This successful project highlights the key role that soft robotic systems, based on flexible and deformable materials, will play," Christoph Keplinger, the Director of the Robotic Materials Department at MPI-IS, concludes.

 

Reference:

A. Shagan Shomron, C. Chase-Markopoulou, J. R. Walter, J. Sellhorn-Timm, Y. Shao, T. Nadler, A. Benson, I. Wochner, E. H. Rumley, I. Wurster, P. Klocke, D. Weiss, S. Schmitt, C. Keplinger*, D. Haeufle*, „ A robotic and virtual testing platform highlighting promise of soft wearable actuators for suppression of wrist tremor“, Device, 2025.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.device.2025.100719

 

END

[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Artificial muscles for tremor suppression Artificial muscles for tremor suppression 2 Artificial muscles for tremor suppression 3

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

A new way to engineer composite materials

A new way to engineer composite materials
2025-03-06
— By Rachel Berkowitz  Composite adhesives like epoxy resins are excellent tools for joining and filling materials including wood, metal, and concrete. But there’s one problem: once a composite sets, it’s there forever. Now there’s a better way. Researchers have developed a simple polymer that serves as a strong and stable filler that can later be dissolved. It works like a tangled ball of yarn that, when pulled, unravels into separate fibers. A new study led by researchers ...

AERA selects 29 exemplary scholars as 2025 Fellows

2025-03-06
WASHINGTON, March 6, 2025—The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has announced the selection of 29 exemplary scholars as 2025 AERA Fellows. The AERA Fellows Program honors scholars for their exceptional contributions to, and excellence in, education research. Nominated by their peers, the 2025 Fellows were selected by the Fellows Committee and approved by the AERA Council, the association’s elected governing body. They will be inducted during a ceremony at the 2025 Annual Meeting in Denver on April 24. With this cohort, there will be a total of 791 AERA Fellows. “The ...

Touchless tech: Control fabrics with a wave of your finger

Touchless tech: Control fabrics with a wave of your finger
2025-03-06
A team of researchers from Nottingham Trent University (UK), Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy) has created washable and durable magnetic field sensing electronic textiles – thought to be the first of their kind – which they say paves the way to transform use in clothing, as they report in the journal Communications Engineering (DOI: 10.1038/s44172-025-00373-x). This technology will allow users to interact with everyday textiles or specialized clothing by simply pointing their finger above a sensor. The researchers show how they placed tiny flexible ...

JMIR aging invites submissions on the social and cultural drivers of health in aging adults

JMIR aging invites submissions on the social and cultural drivers of health in aging adults
2025-03-06
(Toronto, March 6, 2025) JMIR Publications invites submissions to a new theme issue titled Social and Cultural Drivers of Health in Aging Populations in its open access journal JMIR Aging. The premier, peer-reviewed journal is indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, MEDLINE, DOAJ, Scopus, and the Science Citation Index Expanded (Clarivate). As aging populations grow worldwide, understanding the social and cultural factors that impact health outcomes in older adults has become a critical area of study. This theme issue aims to highlight the role of digital health ...

New research sheds light on why scleroderma affects mostly women and how to treat it

2025-03-06
Two new studies led by researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) have uncovered key biological mechanisms driving systemic sclerosis (SSc), or scleroderma – a rare and often devastating autoimmune disease that causes fibrosis (tissue hardening) and inflammation. The research, published in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, helps explain why the disease disproportionately affects women and reveals potential treatment targets, some of which are already in development.  Scleroderma affects approximately 300,000 people in the U.S., with about one-third ...

Lack of appropriate mental health care impacts quality of life for people with COPD

2025-03-06
Miami (March 6, 2025) – Mental health disorders in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are underdiagnosed and undertreated, leading to worsened symptoms and decreased quality of life, according to a new study. The study is published in the January 2025 issue of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases: Journal of the COPD Foundation, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. COPD is an inflammatory lung disease, comprising several conditions, including chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and ...

Yawn! Many people are bored by spiritual practice

2025-03-06
We commonly consider spiritual practices sources of peace and inspiration. A recent study led by researchers of the University of Vienna shows that they can also be experienced differently: Many persons feel bored during these practices – and this can have far-reaching consequences. The results recently published in the academic journal Communications Psychology open up an entirely new field of research and provide fascinating insights into a phenomenon that has received only scant attention so far. Even though boredom is a heavily researched subject at the moment, spiritual boredom has so far been largely neglected in research. Psychologists at the University of ...

A new algorithm sheds light on ‘disordered’ proteins

2025-03-06
The intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) do not attain a stable secondary or tertiary structure and rapidly change their conformation, making structure prediction particularly challenging. These proteins although exhibit chaotic and ‘disordered’ structures, they still perform essential functions. The IDPs comprise approximately 30% of the human proteome and play important functional roles in transcription, translation, and signalling. Many mutations linked to neurological diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), are located in intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDRs). Powerful machine-learning algorithms, including ...

How’s the weather on Mars?

How’s the weather on Mars?
2025-03-06
A new study by researchers including those at the University of Tokyo revealed that atmospheric gravity waves play a crucial role in driving latitudinal air currents on Mars, particularly at high altitudes. The findings, based on long-term atmospheric data, offer a fresh perspective on the behaviors of Mars' middle atmosphere, highlighting fundamental differences from Earth’s. The study applied methods developed to explore Earth’s atmosphere to quantitatively estimate the influence of gravity waves on Mars’ planetary circulation. Despite it being a very cold planet, Mars is quite a hot topic these days. With human visitation seemingly ...

Plants struggled for millions of years after the world’s worst climate catastrophe

Plants struggled for millions of years after the world’s worst climate catastrophe
2025-03-06
A team of scientists from University College Cork (UCC) , the University of Connecticut, and the Natural History Museum of Vienna have uncovered how plants responded to catastrophic climate changes 250 million years ago. Their findings, published in GSA Bulletin, reveal the long, drawn-out process of ecosystem recovery following one of the most extreme periods of warming in Earth’s history: the ‘End-Permian Event’. With more than 80% of ocean species wiped out, the end-Permian event was the worst mass extinction of all time. But the impacts of this event for life on land have been elusive. By examining fossil plants and ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Study reveals how fatal school shootings disrupt local economies

American Psychological Association 2025 Convention, Aug. 7-9, Denver

Appendix cancer incidence has quadrupled in older millennials

Even bumble bee queens need personal days, too

Carbon capture method mines cement ingredients from the air

Fostering Integration: SELINA’s 5th project Workshop on the Azores unites partners to strengthen collaboration

Reelin marks cocaine-activated brain neurons and regulates cocaine reward

Creatine is safe, effective and important for everyone, longtime researcher says

Robots made of linked particle chains

Research alert: laying the groundwork for potential age-related macular degeneration therapies

It’s not the game, it’s the group: Sports fans connect the most over rituals

AI identifies key gene sets that cause complex diseases

Virginia Tech study sheds light on solar farm impacts to property values

Study defines key driver of aggressive ovarian cancer

Rings of time: unearthing climate secrets from ancient trees

Medical AI systems failing to disclose inaccurate race, ethnicity information

Light and AI drive precise motion in soft robotic arm developed at Rice

Vital connections between journalists and whistleblowers under increasing pressure

Patients are opting in for 10 years of breast cancer treatment

Center for Bioenergy Innovation taps Cregger, Eckert as chief science officers

Anthropologists map Neanderthals’ long and winding roads across Europe and Eurasia

Stress genes clear dead cells, offering disease insights

Healthy sleep patterns in adolescence predict better cardiovascular health in the future

A study led by CIC bioGUNE delves into the complexity of the most aggressive form of prostate cancer

Effects of psilocybin on religious and spiritual attitudes and behaviors in clergy from major world religions

Investigating how stress may cause sleep and memory deficits

Researchers find thousands of pediatric firearm deaths linked to more permissive state gun laws

Landmark test for coeliac disease promises to take away the pain of diagnosis

A recipe for success: beefing up the taste of cultured meat with amino acids

Protecting peppers from devastating viral diseases through gene pyramiding

[Press-News.org] Artificial muscles for tremor suppression