Podcast: Exploring the Rise and Future of Exosuit Technology

Mark Harris, CEO and co-founder of HeroWear, leads a team of experienced engineers, ergonomists, and manufacturing experts as they strive to design exosuits that improve workers' health, safety, and productivity worldwide. Mark recently spoke with Laura Davis, editor-in-chief of New Equipment Digest, about the technology behind exosuits and their impact on workplace safety.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

NED: So let's start off with a little bit about HeroWear—how the company came to be and why the focus is on exosuits.

MH: Yeah, absolutely. So the focus on exosuits, and really the creation of the company, all really started with the core problem, which is pretty simple. You know, moving heavy stuff takes a toll on the body and people have suffered from back injuries related to all types of manual material handling for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, right? So I'm sure if you went back to the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, there were a heck of a lot of back injuries back then. And so the industry as a whole, over time, looked for a lot of ways to just engineer out that risk with, of course, you know pallets and forklifts and all kinds of technology tools like that. And I think the core problem that we identified is there's just this subset of tasks that you're not able to easily automate or to do so in a cost-effective fashion, and it still just takes human bodies to move those boxes or run those manufacturing lines. And so over the last few decades, companies have basically taken the approach of “Hey, can we put something on the human body that would offload the back? Different types of exoskeleton/exosuit technology to provide that assistance in a way that you kind of still get your range of motion and you can use it in that task to offload the back.” So that has been around for a while.

What I think was a little unique with us in our direction is, my co-founder Doctor Karl Zelik was an engineering professor at Vandy [Vanderbilt University] and the issue he had was he had a couple small kids and he's like, “I'm young, I'm healthy and these small children are destroying my back.” So he went back to his lab, and he runs a lab that does, you know, rehabilitation science and technology tools, so he went back and he said, “Hey, guys, can you build me something that I could wear all day and would be effectively transparent in my daily life, but it would offload my back?” So what was unique about his thought process there, was in order to actually be adopted, this technology really has to work for the user and so the company basically took a focus on making an exo that was not like what had been done before, which I would kind of broadly categorize as generally they've been, you know, big, bulky, heavy, and awkward to use. And what we've kind of seen throughout the history of exos is they have just traditionally been rejected by the users because they're just saying, “hey, if I can't sit on my forklift, if I can't walk across the factory floor in this thing, if I'm not comfortable, like I'm not going to do it.” So that was what was unique about our approach. And at his first public presentation of this technology, started to get inbounds from really large organizations looking to purchase it. And that was the spark of the idea that led to building a business around the technology.

NED: That's great. I love that there's a human component too, you know, the driving force behind a company. I mean, most are born out of research and innovative designs, but the fact that it's this one person who had this specific problem, that's great. So you kind of already went into this a bit, but the approach to designing this exosuit that you know, it's better for everyday wear, 8-hour wear if you will. What are the basic goals that you're trying to achieve? Like when you were designing the first one, you know what are the things that make you say this is gonna work, people will use this, they're not gonna brush it aside.

MH: Yeah. So I broadly break that down into kind of two main areas. So the first one is you have to be able to provide assistance. You have to be able to offload the back and that's one thing all of these back exo technologies have in common, is you have to provide assistance and basically, the way to think about that is, as I bend over, you know, into a lean or go down into a squat, I'm leveraging the muscles in my low back basically to pull on my spine to keep me from sort of falling onto my face. And so exos basically have to act like artificial back muscles. So they have to sort of provide torque about the hips to offload the low back. And so they're done in kind of a variety of ways. There are some motorized systems that will actually use like power and batteries to do that. There's passive systems like ours that sort of store energy on the way down and return it on the way back out. So that's the first one is you have to figure out like what is the technical way in which you're providing assistance? And there's a variety of ways to do this. Everything from like air springs about the hips to sort of flexible metal rods that bend and return energy. We took an approach of effectively elastic bands that run along the back. So to kind of visualize this, it basically goes on like a small backpack, like a CamelBak—if you're familiar with those. And then it attaches to the upper thigh and then connecting those two components along the back are basically two thick rubber bands. Like if you've seen the thick rogue bands in a gym or something like that. And so as you lean forward or go down, basically the bands stretch, they're storing energy on the way down and then they return about 90% of that energy on the way back up. And that basically kind of feels like somebody is helping lift you back up out of that squat. So that's sort of phase one, you've got to provide the assistance and you have to kind of demonstrate scientifically you can do that. To us, it's kind of the easy part.

The really hard part, the second part, is basically like you have to stay the heck out of the way of the worker and that's the really tricky one. So part of the reason we put the bands where we did and we chose that technology for assistance is because it's behind you—it's out of your way. And when we did motion analysis of workers and factories and warehouse floors, like those boxes are coming up against the chest. They have twisting motions like they need that flexibility and putting the bands behind them kind of got it out of the way. The next thing with staying out of the way was you want that assistance when you're lifting or bending, but if you have to hop on your forklift, you don't want this thing like bucking you right out of your seat, right? So you have to find a way to turn the assistance on and off. So we developed like a clutch that sits on the back that lets you turn the assistance on and off with a flick of a switch.

And that's a key piece of the intellectual property that we developed along this. And then the final part was just trying to make it as comfortable as possible and that is like a huge part of the special sauce. Like if you look at the product, it looks relatively kind of simple and straightforward, but the type of textiles and materials you use, the cut, the way it fits, like it's a lot more complicated than a normal kind of piece of clothing because you have to route forces through it in a way that's comfortable for the user.