This Comment motivates the development of human–machine interfaces that decode spinal motor neuron activity and resulting muscle force information in moving humans. Such interfaces could enable users across the neuromuscular functional spectrum to volitionally control wearable robots with muscle-like behaviour. M.S. discloses support for this work from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework as part of the ERC CoG project ROBOREACTOR (No. 101123866), the ERC PoC project RE-SPINE (No. 101213654), as well as by the Research and Innovation Programme’s project SWAG (No. 101120408).
Neuromechanics and Neuromuscular Robotics (NeuBotics) Lab, Chair of Neuromuscular Robotics, University of Twente, EU, Enschede, The Netherlands Physiology of Wearable Robotics (PoWeR) Lab, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, USA Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, USA The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.
You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Sartori, M., Sawicki, G.S. Volitional control of wearable robots.
Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78416-w DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78416-w
Extract — continue reading at the source.
