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Wearable Muscles

ethz.ch

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Re: Wearable Muscles

#41

Post by samatman »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #31
asd4 wrote: post #30

It's a single axis version of a system my group at NASA developed: https://roundupreads.jsc.nasa.gov/pages.ashx/787/New%20weara... The internal application was to improve mobility in space suits. We had a partnership with some medical researchers looking to help patients with otherwise limited mobility. Shoulders are difficult. The human body has a lot of amazing degrees of freedom. One of the biggest challenges was…

A lot of the design of the human body sacrifices strength for mobility and range of motion. Most muscles have really unfortunate mechanical leverage, to the degree it's quite impressive we're so strong as we are. Adding to that, without completely butchering mobility is probably no easy task.

What's remarkable to me about this is how specialized our shoulder-arm linkage is for overhand throwing.

A lot of the typical difference between the male and female upper body comes down to this specialization. There is some evidence of facial adjustment to punching, but we could hit much harder with a more chimp-like shoulder, this doesn't require knuckle walking: but we wouldn't throw a spear as far nor as accurately.

Re: Wearable Muscles

#42

Post by kenjackson »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #40
2-718-281-828 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also impressed everytime I lift weights and think about how close the muscles attach to the joint providing very little leverage. On a side note - this is why chimps f.x. are so strong - their muscles attach further from the joints and by that provide more leverage.

Yep, and they vary somewhat from person to person. I think it's part of why some people are apparently stronger than they look: longer tendons give more leverage with less muscle mass.

Is there any advantage to having muscle attachments closer to the joint?

Re: Wearable Muscles

#43

Post by Tuna-Fish »

kenjackson wrote: post #42
tomjakubowski wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and they vary somewhat from person to person. I think it's part of why some people are apparently stronger than they look: longer tendons give more leverage with less muscle mass.

Is there any advantage to having muscle attachments closer to the joint?

Range of motion. You can pick up a stick, hold it above your head, and throw it with significant power and control. A chimp can't do that.

Re: Wearable Muscles

#44

Post by silicon2401 »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #35
marginalia_nu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the design of the human body sacrifices strength for mobility and range of motion. Most muscles have really unfortunate mechanical leverage, to the degree it's quite impressive we're so strong as we are. Adding to that, without completely butchering mobility is probably no easy task.

I'm also impressed everytime I lift weights and think about how close the muscles attach to the joint providing very little leverage. On a side note - this is why chimps f.x. are so strong - their muscles attach further from the joints and by that provide more leverage.

> chimps f.x.

Just a small note, that abbreviation seems extremely rare to me. You might have better readability by saying "e.g." which means the same thing, or just writing it out. It took me a while to figure out whether you were referring some body part belonging to chimps or something

Re: Wearable Muscles

#45

Post by User23 »

This is a cool technology. I worry about the risk of causing non-age related sarcopenia though. I expect that can, or perhaps is, mitigated by tuning the inputs to require a near maximum effort from the human to get a near maximum effort from the device. That would maintain adequate muscle stimulation, while still achieving the disability adaptivity goal.

Re: Wearable Muscles

#47

Post by varrock »

martin_a wrote: post #37

This is a _really_ nice website. - Great font, I've always liked the DIN Font for its clarity (DIN is a German industrial norm) - font-size and line-height match each other well and follow best-practices (line-height is 1.4 times the font-size) - well-fitting margins after paragraphs - clear distinction between headline and text, this also applies to meta information etc. - line length is All in all very well done. e…

I'm curious: what do you consider best practices for font-size and line-height, as well as margins between paragraphs? I've recently revamped my website and used an online type scale tool [0] to get my typography, but margins don't seem to be as plug and chug.

0: https://type-scale.com/

Re: Wearable Muscles

#48

Post by saiya-jin »

pvaldes wrote: post #15
leobg wrote: post #8

My immediate thought was: We could use those to power wings and fly! You see, I spent the last weeks reading up on Otto Lilienthal. And while we might think that we have already "cracked" flying, we actually haven't. Humans still cannot fly. We can only board. What we do not have achieved is the sense of "flying like a bird", which Lilienthal was after. The idea that you control your movements through the air directl…

The obvious step would be not try to fly, would be improving hang gliders to be safer, catch better the wind currents or avoid obstacles proactively and have more autonomy. If the device suddenly fails, you still are in a hand glider. Also engineering a motor that would flap like a colibri for hours without failing will be really hard and uncomfortable by the generated heat burning your back, but a motor that would f…

Hang gliders are probably too fast to ever be safe (70kmh average), require big turns, take forever to fold and unfold, are big and heavy, but paragliders are fantastic in this regard (more like 40kmh for non-speed flying). Position is different (comfy chair with feet up vs laying on stomach), but once you fly you don't think about it.

Basically the only thing missing is the functionality for paraglide to become rigid structure on demand and they will be bombproof. There is some initial progress in this regard but its a long way from reality. Endgame would be probably some electrically-induced rigidity via some easy-to-manage remote. Or some smart behavior in between based on whats happening, that would allow easily things not considered possible currently.

Re: Wearable Muscles

#49

Post by moffkalast »

silicon2401 wrote: post #44
2-718-281-828 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also impressed everytime I lift weights and think about how close the muscles attach to the joint providing very little leverage. On a side note - this is why chimps f.x. are so strong - their muscles attach further from the joints and by that provide more leverage.

> chimps f.x. Just a small note, that abbreviation seems extremely rare to me. You might have better readability by saying "e.g." which means the same thing, or just writing it out. It took me a while to figure out whether you were referring some body part belonging to chimps or something

chimps: f(x) = y^2

Re: Wearable Muscles

#50

Post by martin_a »

varrock wrote: post #47
martin_a wrote: post #37

This is a _really_ nice website. - Great font, I've always liked the DIN Font for its clarity (DIN is a German industrial norm) - font-size and line-height match each other well and follow best-practices (line-height is 1.4 times the font-size) - well-fitting margins after paragraphs - clear distinction between headline and text, this also applies to meta information etc. - line length is All in all very well done. e…

I'm curious: what do you consider best practices for font-size and line-height, as well as margins between paragraphs? I've recently revamped my website and used an online type scale tool [0] to get my typography, but margins don't seem to be as plug and chug. 0: https://type-scale.com/

If you're absolving an apprenticeship as a (print) media designer you'll learn that line-height for long(er) text should be somewhere between 120% and 160% of the font-size.

This ensures that your eyes/brain can easily distinct between two lines and "hop" along. The upper limit ensures that you won't lose track of the line because two lines are too far away from each other.

Line length limit comes from this, too. It's hard work for the brain to save a line you just read, jump back to the start of the next line and continue. Short (but not too short!) lines help with that, too.

Paragraph margins are historically based on blank lines, so you can adapt that for your digital text, too and use margin-bottom: 1em or sth. like that (better use the line-height value for the margi, so you include that space, too).

Rules like these obviously date back to the print age, as there are several types of reading (more technical "ways to obtain the information") defined and refered to in "design rules".

You'll "read" a large poster different than a dictionary which is why you can/should deviate from these rules, depending on the setting.

Headlines for example don't need a line-height of 160% but will often work very well with 120% or even smaller. There are no strict rules but more guidelines, so you'll have to develop a sense and feel for that.

Other design rules and their implications play a role, too. Contrast of text to background, phenomena of large color areas, stroke-width of the font and lots of more.

For web typo with I am personally using sans-serif fonts with a larger font-size. Even with wider layouts this helps with getting shorter lines, slightly larger typo improves readability, more line-height reduces the "wall of text" effect, paragraph margins help to distinct different parts of text from each other.

There should be good beginners literature available if you find this interesting.

Also: Try fiddling with the etzh.ch page. Set the line-height to 1.2 and the font-size to 1 rem and you'll immediately see how not to do it. :-D

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