Force and Torque Characterization in the Actuation of a Walking-Assistance, Cable-Driven Exosuit
, Javier Bermejo GarcÃa 1, Ashwin Jayakumar 1, Rafael Lorente Moreno 2, Rafael Agujetas Ortiz 1 and Francisco Romero Sánchez 1
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authots, I congratulate you for the promising and relevant work.
I am afraid you must improve the quality of the paper though. The main concern is regarding clarity: it is difficult to follow the document, as half of the time you are referencing previously accomplished in other papers. It would be very helpful if you could, correctly cited, reproduce the relevant parts of these works you use. More or less the same applies to the "Nomenclature" section: the paper is not so deeply fill of equations you need such a section. I suggest you to mention the name of the different variables in the text (as well, or eliminating the "Nomenclature" section).
You also have to clarify the text, as sometimes it is difficult to follow: I strongly suggest you to have somebody not familiar with the topic to critically read the text, so you can identifiy the flaws on the explanations.
I have added some pieces of comment in the attached PDF for you to improve your paper.
Keep on with the great work!
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In your paper, it would be helpful if you could refer to the more recent literature with particular reference to tendon drives.
Please tell me what controllers are used to control the drive when using a nonlinear force to moment ratio in the linkage.
In lines 143-145, the author describes system stiffness as a combination of body and transmission stiffnesses. This combination is serial or parallel and how body stiffnesses are identified?
Does the system use position measurement between joints?
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This is the preliminary work to design the cable-driven exosuit. The inverse dynamics analysis is performed using gait kinematic data from the well-known Fukuchi database. The relevant forces are theoretically calculated and compared with data in prior works. The results positively support the statement of the authors.
I do like this work since it stands worthy in supporting elder people’s life. However, I am not quite confident regarding the rationality of assumption prior to the theoretical evaluation. Practical issues such as supporting force drift and human-machine action confliction caused by mechanical delay are not considered. Moreover, a simplified model for the lower-limb segments is considered while preliminary prototype-supported real people experiments are missing. The above issues make the work less convincing than it could.
Thus, I would recommend a revision with at least primary stage experiments added.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
