WeMo: A Prototype of a Wearable Mobility Device Adapting to User's Natural Posture Changes

Mobility is fundamental for human beings. In the current society, many personal mobility solutions have been invented to enable more time-efficient mobility, such as self-balancing vehicles, electric unicycles, and electric scooters. Personal mobility devices can provide flexibility to transportation. However, most personal mobility devices need to be carried by their users in the case that they climb stairs and steps. Therefore, many researchers have focused on developing stair-climbing vehicles, but due to the complicated mechanism, these devices are usually huge and heavy. To realize a new type of personal mobility device with more flexibility, we proposed a novel concept of a personal mobility device design that combines the agile mobility of a wheel type mechanism but does not limit a human's natural stair climbing ability. In this study, we introduced a compact personal mobility device, namely WeMo, under the concept of "wearing mobility", which extends humans' mobility in daily life. The developed hardware realizes "walking mode" and "driving mode". Users can move with the motorized driven wheels of the device during driving mode, and users can walk on their feet without any interference from the device during walking mode. In this manuscript, the detailed design of the hardware and control strategy were explained first.Then, we conducted fundamental user tests and discussed the ability of the developed device from test results. Finally, the conclusions and future work were provided.