Walking is man’s best medicine.” These words of Hippocrates couldn’t ring truer in a world where we are clocking more and more steps to realise health goals. But what about the frail and elderly, for whom walking is an uphill task? German scientists have tailored just the device for them — robotic shorts.
Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have come up with a backpack-like motorised system that can help people walk for miles with much less energy expended. “You can walk slowly with the shorts, but you can also jog. We have developed a system that makes people want to move around more. It’s the same concept as the electric bike, but for walking,” TUM professor Lorenzio Masia states in a press release. The research was published in Nature Machine Intelligence journal.
