Exoskeleton boots learn how you walk to help improve your gait

An exoskeleton boot that lets you walk faster while using less energy could help older people or those with disabilities move around.Existing exoskeletons have failed to make the step into the real world because they need to be fine-tuned to a person's gait over long periods. Without such personalisation, the hardware may provide only a minimal boost or even make walking harder. "Despite all the things you see in the comic books and superhero movies, exoskeletons are really, really tricky," says Steve Collins at Stanford University in California. Collins and his colleagues have previously found tailoring an exoskeleton to an individual to be a lengthy task. The wearer had to visit the lab for five consecutive days and walk on a treadmill for 2 hours each day while wearing an uncomfortable respirator and sensors so that the content of the air they breathed in and out, and therefore their metabolic effort, could be measured. Now, the researchers have come up with a computer model that absorbs the data from 3600 of their previous laboratory tests to learn how to approximate the metabolic effort based on physical data from the exoskeleton's sensors alone.