Contact the source provider Comtex at editorial comtex. Economic Calendar. Retirement Planner. Sign Up Log In. Key Highlights from Exoskeleton Market Study. My wife had a baby in June. The Blotter. Mandatory Fun. PCS Moves. But during an evening in late January, he was just interested in the chance to extend and stretch his body.

Standing is an essential exercise for Sanchez if he wants to avoid sores and other injuries. Not only are passive exoskeletons arriving on the wearable robotics catwalk, but many new exoskeletons have gone soft, eschewing metal frames altogether for flexible fabric and artificial muscles. The new trend stems from a DARPA-funded program dubbed Warrior Web , which seeks to prevent damage to injury-prone areas of the body and minimize fatigue.

Rich Mahoney, co-founder and CEO of Superflex, a Bay Area spin-off of leading research and development lab SRI International, is adapting this idea to create smart sensor-actuated clothing for senior citizens with mobility problems. Similarly, it would help you up the stairs. Instead of relying on a human operator's muscle contractions to move the limbs, HAL incorporated sensors that picked up the electrical messages sent by the operator's brain. Theoretically, an exoskeleton based on the HAL-5 concept would enable a user to do whatever he or she wanted without moving a muscle, simply by thinking about it [source: Cyberdyne ].

In the next section, we'll look at the current state of the art in powered exoskeletons, and where the technology may soon lead. Network World reports that current systems, which weigh about 55 pounds 25 kilograms , can enable human operators to carry pounds 91 kilograms of weight with little or no effort and dramatically less fatigue. Additionally, the latest exoskeletons are quieter than the typical office printer, and can run at speeds of 10 miles per hour 16 kilometers per hour and perform squats and crawls, in addition to lifting [source: Heary ].

Raytheon was so confident of its prospects that, in , it released a video featuring Clark Gregg, one of the actors from the "Iron Man" movie franchise, doing the narration as a second-generation exoskeleton karate-chopped wood, did pushups and lifted weights [source: Weinberger ]. Meanwhile, fellow defense contractor Lockheed Martin is working on a rival exoskeleton designed for heavy lifting, with the ability to transfer the weight from heavy loads to the ground through the robotic legs of the lower-body exoskeleton.

The company says that the exoskeleton also is able to perform deep squats, crawls and upper-body lifting with minimal human exertion [source: Lockheed Martin ].

Soldiers could use this technology to obtain information about the terrain they're crossing and how to navigate their way to specific locations. DARPA is also developing computerized fabrics that could be used with the exoskeletons to monitor heart and breathing rates.

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