Bioinspired kirigami metasurfaces as assistive shoe grips
Name
Kirigami shoes.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.04 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6fdad46da3279a1a3c64e521a3a0656f
Author(s)
Babaee, Sahab
Pajovic, Simo
Rafsanjani, Ahmad
Shi, Yichao
Bertoldi, Katia
Traverso, Giovanni
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Nature Biomedical Engineering
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Babaee, Sahab, Pajovic, Simo, Rafsanjani, Ahmad, Shi, Yichao, Bertoldi, Katia et al. 2020. "Bioinspired kirigami metasurfaces as assistive shoe grips." Nature Biomedical Engineering, 4 (8).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. Falls and subsequent complications are major contributors to morbidity and mortality, especially in older adults. Here, by taking inspiration from claws and scales found in nature, we show that buckling kirigami structures applied to footwear outsoles generate higher friction forces in the forefoot and transversally to the direction of movement. We identified optimal kirigami designs capable of modulating friction for a range of surfaces, including ice, by evaluating the performance of the dynamic kirigami outsoles through numerical simulations and in vitro friction testing, as well as via human-gait force-plate measurements. We anticipate that lightweight kirigami metasurfaces applied to footwear outsoles could help mitigate the risk of slips and falls in a range of environments.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41551-020-0564-3
