Motion-Driven Neural Optimizer for Prophylactic Braces Made by Distributed Microstructures

Joint injuries, and their long-term consequences, present a substantial global health burden. Wearable prophylactic braces are an attractive potential solution to reduce the incidence of joint injuries by limiting joint movements that are related to injury risk. Given human motion and ground reaction forces, we present a computational framework that enables the design of personalized braces by optimizing the distribution of microstructures and elasticity. As varied brace designs yield different reaction forces that influence kinematics and kinetics analysis outcomes, the optimization process is formulated as a differentiable end-to-end pipeline in which the design domain of microstructure distribution is parameterized onto a neural network. The optimized distribution of microstructures is obtained via a self-learning process to determine the network coefficients according to a carefully designed set of losses and the integrated biomechanical and physical analyses. Since knees and ankles are the most commonly injured joints, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline by designing, fabricating, and testing prophylactic braces for the knee and ankle to prevent potentially harmful joint movements.