Podcast: Wear This Exoskeleton & Save Your Knees!

In this episode, we explore the versatile knee exoskeleton designed to enhance safety during lifting by using a novel design that improves the freedom of movement and safety in comparison to current state of the art.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. 

Episode Notes

(2:50) - Save Your Knees

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our favorite place to get electronics parts for any project, whether it be a hobby at home or a prototype for work. Click HERE to learn more about the role of exoskeletons in factories and why they are a growing necessity for the workforce!

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Transcript

Hey peeps, welcome back to the Next Byte podcast. This one, we're gonna be talking about exoskeletons, think Iron Man, but day to day Iron Man. Iron Man that does blue collar work, lifts stuff up, and might be painful, but exoskeletons are here to save the day. So, let's step into this one. Let's get into it.

I'm Daniel, and I'm Farbod. And this is the NextByte Podcast. Every week, we explore interesting and impactful tech and engineering content from Wevolver.com and deliver it to you in bite sized episodes that are easy to understand, regardless of your background. 

Farbod: Folks, welcome back to the podcast. And as you heard, today we're talking about lifting, but not necessarily the lifting you do at the gym, but the lifting you do on a day-to-day basis, which you're probably gonna hit home for the folks that are working in construction or in factories and things like that. By the way, speaking of factories, today's episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Mouser Electronics. And if you've been rocking them with us for a while, then you know why we like Mouser. So, Dan, tell the great folks, why do we love working with Mouser so much?

Daniel: Two big things about them. And I emphasize the word big because they're one of the world's biggest electronics distributors. They know everything in and out about what's going on in industry, what's going on in academia, what's going on with startups. They know what's at the cutting edge, the latest and greatest. That's point one. Point two is they don't just hoard that information to themselves. They do a great job of communicating it, sharing it with everyone in awesome technical resources. So, we've got a plethora of awesome resources for us to select. One of those is what we've got linked in the show notes today which is related to AR and robotics and how they impact exoskeletons.

Farbod: Exactly, they're just so relevant and the timing is kind of impeccable when it comes to the stuff that we wanna talk about. And you're right, in this article that we're gonna be linking in the show notes, they're talking about industry 5.0. We've been talking about 4.0 for a while, we're now at the 5.0 level, we're taking things up a notch. And in 5.0, you have AR coming in, you have robotics coming into play. I mean, I guess robotics have always been in play, but a different generation of robotics coming into play but they specifically call out exoskeletons in this one. And it's interesting, they don't just phrase it by saying, hey, exoskeletons make things safer, they make things more efficient. They also say exoskeletons can actually completely revolutionize how manual labor's done because it opens up the market of candidates that can do this task a whole lot more. I'll be honest, I'm not the kind of guy that's lifting 100 pounds of anything for eight hours a day, but you put half an Iron Man suit on me, that could change. And I'm guessing that's the case for a lot of people, right?

Daniel: Well, a pertinent culture example and economics example right now is the Dock strikes, Longshoremen strikes.

Farbod: Yes.

Daniel: You see any of this at all?

Farbod: Yes.

Daniel: So, we've got a lot of these Longshoremen, they're striking, right? They want to make more money. The union says, we haven't made a strong enough agreement that shows wage increase over time. And there's a lot of people making jokes on the internet saying like, oh, well, the average longshoreman makes like $200,000 a year already. Like, why do you need more money? And the fact of the matter is they're working there on an hourly wage, they're doing a lot of physical labor. And a lot of these people that are making jokes online saying, I would go do this for $200,000. If they went to the docks and they tried to do that job, they physically couldn't, they couldn't hang for weeks and weeks and weeks. This is, like you're saying here, right? Potentially getting access to exoskeleton, something like that to potentially expand the workforce for a lot of these physical tasks where there's already a labor shortage in the labor pool. And folks like dock workers have to ask for more money because they feel like they're not being compensated fairly for the physical labor that they do with long hours. This could help with that, right. And help reduce injuries, help produce or help with extra productivity, et cetera, using technology kind of percolating backwards into physical labor to try and improve those industries as well.

Farbod: Absolutely, totally agree. And again folks, if you're listening, if you're curious about this or the other pieces of tech that Daniel mentioned, check it out. We're gonna be linking the show notes as always. And with that out of the way, let's start talking about exoskeletons. So obviously they're kind of like the main theme of this episode, but we're gonna be going to University of Michigan where they've tried to look at the downsides of the current exoskeletons on the market. And I think this article from Wevolver breaks it down really well. They're like, hey, they exist. They've been able to add value to the workforce. But here are the main drawbacks. First of all, they're usually back braces. So as the name implies, they mount to your back, they brace your back so that you're not doing a damaging movement while you're lifting something up. But the main assumption that these exoskeletons right now are operating on there is that you're actually lifting in poor form. So, you're not doing the whole squat, pick it up with your legs, not your back system. And that's all fine and dandy because they still offer value, but the people that are operating these exoskeletons are actually kind of constricted. It holds your back steady, but on the flip side, it restricts your movement from like non-lifting operations. So, what you end up having to do is when you're not lifting, you have to disengage this thing. When you are lifting, you have to engage it. So that's already a downside. On top of that, they talk about how these exoskeletons come with a predefined set of movements and actions. So, if you're the developer in the factory, you're like, all right, you're gonna bend over to pick something up, you're gonna lift something up the stairs. So, if you're doing an action that's kind of out of the norm from those set actions, it might not do the thing that you wanna do. And one of the researchers made a great point. He was like, imagine you wanna go down the stairs and the exoskeleton wants to go up the stairs. It's a pretty uncomfortable setting to be in. And if it wants to readjust, reassessments can take up to a second at a time, which might not seem very long, but just think about how quickly your brain processes movement. Like it happens in the milliseconds, right? So, they just basically give you like this holistic picture of like, we've done great things on exoskeletons, but it has some major downsides that are actually impacting the people using it day to day.

Daniel: Well, and one of the things that I think that they mentioned right now is because of this restriction in movement and potentially supporting improper form, there's a lot of, let's say higher adoption rate in back braces because the level of mobility that you have in your back is lower as compared to the knee. So, they said that, you know, one of their ultimate challenges would be creating a knee exoskeleton that works in a way that feels natural to the user, that supports proper form, but then also helps prevent posture breakdown during fatigue. I said that, I think that's another portion that may be neglected by current solutions is it's not just supporting the person's movement for rep number one, right? To make sure that they have proper form when they do one repetition or to help them lift something that's three times heavier than they might be able to normally lift. A lot of the injuries that come in common, manufacturing and construction, are not because someone's lifting something heavier than they're able to. It's the fact that they're doing it for the 400th time that day. And because of fatigue, their speed starts to slow down, their form starts to change a little bit, and they've got poor posture, and that's when the vast majority of these injuries happen or when workers are already fatigued. So, this team from University of Michigan is designing, I kind of alluded to it already, a knee exoskeleton focused on maintaining proper form, proper lifting posture, supporting the leg muscles and supporting the knee joint, but specifically in terms of fatigue as well. Because a lot of times when someone's doing this job, they're not just lifting something really heavy one time per day, or even five times per day, they may be doing it hundreds of times per day. So, to try and support them through hundreds of movements as opposed to thinking on the scale of maybe one to 10.

Farbod: Yeah, absolutely. And so, I guess the question that folks listening might be asking themselves now is, if the main form factor of these exoskeletons so far has been a back brace, why are they now moving to the knees? And there's actually a really simple answer for that. We've been talking about form, proper form for lifting. If you follow proper form, as Daniel does when he does his, I don't even know how many deadlifts. All the power, all the support should be coming from your quads. Or what is the technical term for the anatomy of that muscle?

Daniel: The quadriceps. I think the quadriceps.

Farbod: Quadriceps, there we go. So, a lot of the power should be coming from the quadricep muscle. And these researchers identified that. And if I'm not mistaken, this is the first exoskeleton that is targeted specifically for the quadricep. So, they're like, that's where the most power should come. That's where we're gonna focus most of our energy. And on top of that, the way that it's designed, the location that it is, it by default is kind of less restrictive, right? Like if something is fixed to your back, you do so many movements with your back and it's gonna be completely rigid, but now it's moving to your legs and it can just kind of flow the flow of your legs. And I guess to add on top of that, another piece of this magic secret sauce that they've been cooking up is that the gearing for the motors that go on the exoskeleton are tuned enough where it doesn't mess with your gate of walking. So, like if I put it on, I shouldn't feel like I really have anything on it's just gonna feel like I'm guessing a heavy pair of pants which I'm sure is quite appreciated by the folks wearing these things eight hours a day.

Daniel: Well, and one of the things I want to mention is in this case they actually used commercially available knee braces, right? They didn't go and design their own knee brace for this portion. They took a commercially available knee brace and retrofitted it with motors originally made for drones. So, they're kind of like Frankenstein-ing this thing together, but all that to say is it looks very similar to these commercially available knee braces that you see like football players wearing during games. So, if it was truly painful or truly not restrictive or truly restrictive for football players to wear these when they're playing hundreds of snaps per game or doing hundreds of snaps per week in practice, they wouldn't be wearing them. But this is something that you see in the real-world adoption already that they're not trying to reinvent the knee brace here. They're already leveraging all this research that's been done to make a commercially available knee brace that supports the joint, as well as allowing it to move through its natural range of motion. They're just retrofitting their technology to this to help improve that, to take it a step further. So, they're standing on the shoulders of all this work that's already been done in the neighbor space as opposed to going back from scratch and trying to learn all those learnings on their own.

Farbod: For sure. And not only are they using, like you said, a tried-and-true product that's already out there which people are comfortable with, this has its own advantages when it comes to cost and production at scale. But I don't want to get there yet. There's a couple of other things I want to talk about. But when we reach the so what section, there's one really interesting data point that I know you're going to appreciate. But with that said, I think the last thing that I wanted to talk about with our secret sauce was, you know, we talked about these other exoskeletons in the market. They have these predefined movements and then if you do anything out of the norm, they kind of freak out. Well, these folks decided to use a physics-based machine learning model, which means it has algorithms running physics equations basically that can tell it the kinematics of if I'm moving my leg this way, it probably means this is the trajectory I'm going. So, adjust with me, don't fight against me when I'm doing that. And they said it's updating about 124 times per second. So, in terms of latency, the users should feel that a whole lot less than they would with one calculation per second.

Daniel: Yeah, it's 124 times faster than the current solution, right? And like you're saying, when your brain thinks in the scale of milliseconds, that means a big deal as opposed to having to wait a second for the thing to catch up with you before you're able to make the movement that your brain told you to do one whole second ago.

Farbod: Exactly. So, all that to say that they've come up with a very interesting product that should eliminate a lot of the issues that exist with the current exoskeletons, but all that means nothing if there's no data to back up if this thing is good or bad, right? And that's where this little test comes in. So, they picked a study of five women and five men and they emulated the condition of fatigue and a fresh day. So basically, like what you were talking about earlier, where you have someone that's working on a factory line for hours and hours and hours, over time they get fatigued, they slow down, their posture gets pretty bad. So, they were trying to emulate that to say, hey, how does Farbod's improvement, for example, change with this exoskeleton in a fatigue state and in a fresh state, right? So, the data is incredibly impressive. In comparison to a pre-fatigue state, the users slow down by only 1% when using this exoskeleton in a fatigued state. So that's huge already, right? But then you compare it to, well, what does it look like for someone that is not using an exoskeleton at all? They are 44% faster with this thing. And that's like, in terms of, you know, if you're a manager, if you're a process improvement person, the dollar signs that you should be thinking of the moment you hear that data point should be massive or huge as some might say.

Daniel: Yeah, and the learning here is like you mentioned it a little bit earlier like it might feel like a really heavy pair of pants or something like that, but it's not that wearing this exoskeleton slows people down significantly. They're saying even after this participant carries, I think was a 20 pound kettlebell through this obstacle course over different terrains, different incline levels like it seems like a crossfit workout carrying this weight through all this course, the person without the exoskeleton slowed down 44% when they weren't wearing it. The person with the exoskeleton only saw a 1% reduction in performance after they were fatigued. So, this is saying after a long day's work, after tying you out on the construction site, you're performing only 1% slower than you were at the start of the day when you're completely fresh, as opposed to if you weren't wearing this exoskeleton, you're 44% slower. So, like really, the key takeaway there from a productivity perspective, why a lot of people want to invest in these for their workers is like, hey, I can be more productive. And I would personally feel happier to wear this at work. If I knew that it would help me work faster and get more work done. But also seeing that how fatigue relates to injury. If you're reducing fatigue by 44 times factor, I'd hope that you're also reducing injury by at least a 44 times factor as well.

Farbod: Agreed! Agreed! And let’s run some quick numbers, right? Assuming a conservative, what? $40,000 US salary a year for someone that's working on a factory line. You're now saying, let's just bring it up to 50%. They're gonna be working 50% faster than they were before with these exoskeletons. That's roughly $20,000 of productivity added to your line with just one person by introducing this device, right?

Daniel: Well, and I think outside of that too, for workers you've got to or I guess for companies, you got to think about the costs of injury as well. And then for workers as well, right? They said that they could potentially reduce the cost of workplace injuries by over 30%. Because there's a lot of these injuries that are related to poor lifting posture and fatigue. Think about like every single potential injury claim is like $40,000 plus for the company because they've got to pay for the medical care of the person who just got hurt and no one wants to get hurt while they're working. And file an injury claim, right? No one wants to be out of work. No one wants to be hurt. No one wants to have to take time to recover. But from a pure dollars perspective as well, you're not just improving these people's quality of life at their work. They say these things cost $4,000 per unit now in prototype. They think they can get it down to $2,000 per unit at scale. I'm sorry, did I take your number?

Farbod: You stole it.

Daniel: I'm sorry, man.

Farbod: You stole my juicy data point.

Daniel: But I was gonna say, like, it costs, let's say they get mass production down to $2,000 per unit. Yeah. $4,000 per person. If they're wearing two knee braces that costs 10 times less than an injury claim. The productivity increase may help pay for it, but truly just cutting injury costs down and improving these people's lives to where they don't get hurt at work doing these repetitive tasks. I think that this could offer significant improvement and benefit not just for the workers also for the companies and in a way that aligns the incentives in the way that hopefully these folks are able to push this to adoption really quickly in industry.

Farbod: Dude, I totally agree and where I was trying to drive with my like little back of the napkin data analysis there was like, imagine you're one of these big companies that employs people that do physical labor. For maybe less than a month salary you could get a tool that pays off for itself, immediately. And that super valuable to me. And we were talking about earlier how they're using off the shelf components to make what they're making here. And the reason I wanted to bring it up later is because that's such a great strategy because at that point, prices can only come down versus if you were to make something completely custom in-house, you might be able to 3D print stuff and save costs here and there, but then to actually get it manufactured and then scale it. That's probably just gonna add cost. So very smart move by these folks over at the University of Michigan. Not only did they make something useful, but it looks like it's gonna be something that is actually manufacturable, which I know is one of the rants that Daniel loves to go on in this podcast. It's not just good enough for it to work in a lab. We gotta be able to see it in person.

Daniel: Actually, yeah, I'm with you, man. So, I don't know what their next steps are here. They said they've applied for a patent. I know they tested on a group of 10 people, five women, five men. I'd love to see them test with more people, refine the solution and get it to market.

Farbod: I'm excited, dude. Personally, I'd be curious to try one out, get some more of my reps in at the gym. Feel like I don't have to be constrained by the five-pound plates I keep putting up, but that's a topic for a different podcast. I think now's a good time to wrap up kind of just generally what we talked about.

Daniel: Yes, sir.

Farbod: So, folks, if you do physical labor or if you know someone that does physical labor, then you know what a toll it takes on your body. It's no joke. Doing it eight hours a day, you can seriously do some damage. And fortunately, exoskeletons have been entering the market to kind of lessen the load on people. And as great as they've been, there's some improvement that we can make. Specifically, these exoskeletons, they are fixated on your back. They constrain your movement when you're not lifting. Overall, it has not been a very positive experience for a lot of the people that wear these things. Well, we're in luck because at the University of Michigan, they've been doing some innovating things, including a new exoskeleton that works like a knee brace that is just focused on your quads because your quads is where all the power comes from when you're lifting something. Some key improvements, these things use a machine learning model that's powered by physics. So, if you wanna change your movement, you're not constrained to the predefined movement of these old generation exoskeletons. They're fairly affordable. Right now, they're making them for about $4,000, but they're gonna come down to 2,000, at least what they’re promising. And in a quick test that they did with folks, both, men and women, they've been able to see a 44% improvement in performance when someone is fatigued. So, imagine you've been working for a couple hours, you get tired, your performance declines. Well, not with this exoskeleton. It makes sure that you're working in your tip top shape. That's why I think this might be the most impactful technology for blue collar workers, construction, factory workers, everyone else.

Daniel: I love it.

Farbod: I do what I can. And folks, thank you so much for listening. As always, we'll catch you in the next one.

Daniel: Peace.

As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.