Robotic exoskeleton helps the paralysed walk

3rd February 2016

Enaie Azambuja

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Paralysed from the waist down after a BMX accident, Steven Sanchez rolled into SuitX’s Berkeley, California, office in a wheelchair. A half-hour later he was standing and walking thanks to the Phoenix, a robotic exoskeleton now available for around $40,000. The suit returns movement to wearers’ hips and knees with small motors attached to standard orthotics.

Wearers can control the movement of each leg and walk at up to 1.1 miles per hour by pushing buttons integrated into a pair of crutches.

At 27 pounds, the Phoenix is not the lightest exoskeleton in existence. It’s not the cheapest, either. But it's among the lightest and cheapest exoskeletons that can restore a person's mobility. It also has unique abilities; the suit is modular and adjustable so it can adapt to, say, a relatively tall person who just needs mobility assistance for one knee.

A battery pack worn as a backpack powers the exoskeleton for up to eight hours. An app can be used to track the patient’s walking data. SuitX has mainly worked with patients with spinal cord injuries, who can use the Phoenix to walk again.

“We can’t really fix their disease. We can’t fix their injury. But what it would do is postpone the secondary injuries due to sitting,” says SuitX founder and CEO Homayoon Kazerooni. “It gives a better quality of life.”

The technology behind SuitX’s industrial and medical exoskeleton originated at the Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, which Kazerooni leads. He said his major goal is to build a version of the exoskeleton for children. Children with neurological disorders sometimes need intensive walking training or can risk losing their mobility.

SuitX is just one of the companies hoping to boost interest in exoskeleton research. Competing suits like the ReWalk, which costs $70,000 and weighs about 50 pounds, are striving to reduce costs while improving functionality.

Volker Bartenbach, an exoskeleton researcher at ETH Zurich, says a combination of performance, price, and clinically proven benefits will give rise to the first widely adopted exoskeleton.

“Speed, operating time, mobility, and usability have to be good enough so that those systems are perceived as better by the user than the alternatives,” Bartenbach says. “If you need 10 minutes to walk to the bakery 300 feet away in your exoskeleton that takes five minutes to put on, you will probably use the wheelchair instead.”