Communications of the ACM

The IHMC team came up with a second prototype, called Mina, in the 2008–2009 timeframe, which was much more successful, according to Noorden. At that point, he was contracted by IHMC to NASA, which he says was interested in the technology to help astronauts exercise in space.

However, after dealing with the fall-
out of budget cuts at NASA, Noorden
decided to go out on his own and start
a real estate investing business, “so
that I could continue doing research
without having to ask the government
for funding.”
In the meantime, several things
need to happen for exoskeletons to
improve, observers say. Like Noor-
den, Krebs says, “We’re still not
only trying to hide the hardware, but
make it lighter. Many of the actua-
tors and motors are still bulky, and
it’s not easy to reduce the weight of
the devices.” If the weight is reduced,
“many times we don’t have the be-
havior we need,” meaning when the
motor becomes smaller, it becomes
more difficult for a person to move.
“Ultimately, you want to devise some-
thing transparent that will help move
you and assist you but won’t hold you
back. But we’re not there yet.”
Not only is the goal to make a exo-
skeleton device lighter, but also for
it to behave in a way that people feel
good about it, so it does not hold them
back or prevent them from doing a
particular movement. “This balance
is what makes engineering difficult,”
Krebs says.

Yet, Krebs believes within 10 years
the technology will have come far
enough that it will be “far more avail-
able in multiple settings.”
He also thinks exoskeletons will be
front and center at the Tokyo Summer
Olympics games in 2020. Toyota’s
Partner Robot division has developed
a device to exercise the knee of a pa-
tient, and many other Japanese-based
companies also are working on exo-
skeleton rehabilitation devices, he
says. “I think the [Tokyo] Paralym-
pics will be more interesting than the
regular Olympics,” he says, “because
there will be lots of demonstrations of
technology to help people move,” due
to the number of Japanese companies
that are working on exoskeletal tech-
nology now.

In healthcare, the main goal is to make exoskeletal devices “essentially disappear” and become “soft exoskeletals.” Many people are working right now on incorporating such systems into clothing, Krebs says, such as a pair of pants with wires or cables that would be able to assist a person’s mobility. One is an Israeli company called ReWalk Robotics, which has partnered with The Wyss Institute at Harvard University to make assistive exosuits devices for people with lower-limb disabilities.

Whitton thinks that as a result of the cost and “complexity of the health supply chain,” due to a strict regulatory environment and the need to tailor an exoskeleton to an individual, health-care will not be the biggest market for exoskeletons. He anticipates greater adoption in industries like manufacturing, mining, and defense.

“In many cases, a robot isn’t sufficiently adaptable or dexterous to perform a wide number of tasks,” Whitton explains, whereas industrial and mobile robots and exoskeletons are aimed at assisting human workers to enable them to do more, and more easily.

Whitton also foresees the systems
becoming lighter and more dexterous
and expects them to be deployed like
Internet of Things (Io T) devices with
artificial intelligence (AI) capabili-
ties such as data analytics, to moni-
tor worker performance and measure
when a worker might be most at risk
for injury. Exoskeletons are going to
be laden with sensors and will be con-
nected with other wearables like mo-
bile control panels, he says. “While
current systems are somewhat rudi-
mentary, the aim is to track historical
data about worker body positioning
and to track [an] exosuit’s location
through the workspace.”
Significant progress needs to be
made on the social side, too. “There
needs to be a greater sense of their
transformative potential and the po-
tential to get sufficient ROI in a suffi-
cient amount of time,” Whitton adds.
Exoskeletons are “a capital-intensive
technology and we don’t know when
the ROI will be. I think that will change
over time as they are deployed by big-
ger companies.”