"AIDOS" - The exomuscle

Industrial Design project together with SICSA (Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture) - University of Houston x Lund University

Created in a team with Ebba Kjellin

2021

Duration 16 weeks

In this project, our brief was to design for extreme environments, where the aim is to create a better living in space and on earth.

Astronauts lose up to 20% of muscle mass during only 11 days of space flight. Even though they work out on a daily basis, the muscle loss is still comprehensive. 

We got in contact with Edwin Jager, a professor in applied physics at Linköping University. He has researched and started to develop a muscle-like fabric. By coating fabric fibers with an electroactive solution, they can act as real muscle fibers when it is activated with electricity. It contracts and releases. This could have the potential to work as "textile-muscles". The textile is still in the research phase but will be available at a larger scale in about 10 years. We wanted to create a concept around this fabric, to see what it could help to solve and how we could use it in the future.  

By looking into the gait cycle, the process of walking, and investigating the muscles that activate during the different steps, we could develop a functional model that worked as a muscle suit that would activate together with your own muscles as you’re walking. After this, we wanted to implement our design language into the suit and designed a looks-like model to show the concept of an exo-muscle leg suit.