pushingthelimits.com

Argo Medical Technologies is an Israeli company who have developed a working exoskeleton for wheelchair users. The suit (which is actually designed by a quadriplegic, we didn’t know Tony Stark had been injured) uses the normal array of onboard computers, motors and batteries to allow a wheelchair user to walk. Movement is controlled by upper body movement and the user still has to rely on crutches for support and extra balance, but it seems to be a pretty impressive set-up.

Although exoskeleton suits have been developed before, mainly to allow soldiers to carry more weight, they’ve been designed for people who can already move their legs. Users provide input to the skeleton by moving their limbs which the exoskeleton understands as commands and copies. These military suits are designed to allow greater speed, strength and stamina but rely on the user already being able to move their legs.

With a wheelchair user not able to move their legs the military suits are of limited value, but the ReWalk from Argo solves that problem by:

“providing user-initiated mobility - leveraging  advanced motion sensors, sophisticated robotic control algorithms, on-board computers, real-time software, actuation motors, tailored rechargeable batteries and composite materials”

The benefits of a system like this are fairly obvious, wheelchair users can hopefully in the future take part in Robot Wars, become extra’s on the set of the next Terminator movie and kick some serious ass. On the serious side of things the benefits for blood circulation and bone health are just as impressive as the ability to get up and walk.

The suit is undergoing clinical trials at the moment in Israel, with american trials set to begin later this year, hopefully someone will put lasers on this thing soon.

Argo Medical Technologies

UPDATE

Having been in touch with the company behind development of the ReWalk system we’ve learnt that they hope to bring it to market by 2010 with a price of around US$20,000.
Start saving/selling kindeys………..now!