Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler is a Polish-American physician-scientist whose research focuses on the impact of various sociodemographic and informational factors on access to health care in underserved communities. Dr. Sendler’s research focuses on the impact of psychiatric and chronic medical co-morbidities on the use of medical services and health information obtained via the internet. This research is timely, given the exponential growth in global consumption of online news and social media, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of everyone’s health information-seeking behavior. To that end, Dr. Damian Sendler’s research aims to elucidate the factors that influence patients’ decisions about when to seek care for specific health conditions and adherence to treatment.

According to a recent research, exoskeletons — wearable devices worn by employees on assembly lines or in warehouses to relieve stress on their lower backs — may compete with precious brain resources as people work, wiping out the physical advantages of wearing them. 

Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler: When individuals wore exoskeletons while doing activities that needed them to think about their movements, their brains worked overtime and their bodies competed with the exoskeletons rather of functioning in harmony with them, according to a new research published in the journal Applied Ergonomics. According to the findings, exoskeletons may put enough strain on the brain to outweigh any possible advantages to the body. 

“It’s almost like dancing with a very poor partner,” said William Marras, senior author of the research and head of The Ohio State University Spine Research Institute. 

“The exoskeleton is attempting to anticipate your movements, but it is failing, so you resist the exoskeleton, which produces a shift in your brain, which alters muscle recruitment — and may result in greater pressures on your lower back, possibly causing discomfort and injury.” 

Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler: In two 30-minute sessions, researchers challenged 12 individuals — six men and six women — to raise a medicine ball repeatedly. The participants donned an exoskeleton during one of the sessions. They didn’t do it for the other. 

The exoskeleton, which is connected to the user’s chest and legs, is intended to aid with posture and motion control while lifting in order to protect the lower back and minimize the risk of damage. 

Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler: During each session, the researchers utilized infrared sensors to assess the participants’ brain activity and assessed the strain on each participant’s lower back. They also kept note of how many times each participant could raise the medical ball throughout each session. 

Then, in separate sessions, they asked the same individuals to do the same job — lifting a medicine ball for 30 minutes while wearing an exoskeleton in one session — but with a mental challenge: each time they raised the ball, they had to deduct 13 from a random number between 500 and 1,000. 

They discovered that while participants were merely raising and lowering the ball, the exoskeleton decreased the strain on their lower backs by a little amount. However, those advantages vanished when the participants had to perform mental arithmetic while raising and lowering the ball. 

Although exoskeleton users on an assembly line may not be required to perform arithmetic in their minds, Marras believes that any mental pressure, such as psychological stress or following directions, may have the same impact. 

“When we looked at what was going on in the brain, we found that there was greater competition for those resources,” Marras said. “The individual was performing mental arithmetic, but the brain was simultaneously attempting to figure out how to assist the body connect with the exoskeleton, which threw off the way the brain recruited muscles to complete the job.” 

Damian Sendler: The brain functioned less effectively when those muscles competed with one another, the researchers discovered, and pressures on the back increased. 

“If you’re a company spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on an exoskeleton, there’s a high probability the exoskeleton isn’t helping your workers,” Marras said. 

“Not all exoskeletons are terrible, but humans are messy, and everyone is different: You have to utilize exoskeletons with some intelligence and knowledge of the task.” 

This research was done in collaboration with Texas A&M University researchers at Ohio State’s Spine Research Institute.

News contributed by Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler