🚨 Milestone: There are now 40+ peer-reviewed scientific publications on HeroWear exosuits.

So, at this point, I find myself less interested in scrutinizing every detail of every individual study. The more interesting question is: What have we actually learned from all of them?

Early on, I did pay close attention to every new paper that came out. I dove super deep into the methods and results. Sometimes I digitized the results from other labs so I could do more analysis, or followed up with the authors to learn more.

There simply weren’t that many data points—and I ate it all up.

But at some point, the work changed. The priority shifted.

Now, I often find the Discussion sections of individual papers to be too narrow, and not fully contextualized within what is currently a large evidence base spanning academia and industry. And I don’t think enough people are truly synthesizing and communicating what we’ve learned from all of it.

❌ The interesting question is no longer:

“What did the latest study find?”

✅ It becomes:

“What have we learned from ALL of them?”

Or:

• Where do independent researchers converge on the same conclusions?

• Where do lab findings hold up in the real world?

• Where do academic studies, field evaluations, case studies, and long-term experience point in the same direction?
• Where should we now have strong scientific conviction?

Here’s one place where I do:

The reductions in back loading that have been repeatedly measured in controlled lab studies really do translate to meaningful impacts in the real world:

Workers report less back discomfort and fatigue. This aligns with EMG and modeling studies. And across long-term deployments, we've seen real adoption and case studies measuring lower incidence of back injuries.

☝🏽 What’s most striking to me is that these real-world and long-term impacts have genuinely exceeded what we ever predicted from early university studies..

We knew that elastic exosuits could reduce loading on the low back muscles and discs, and could be practical and comfortable with the right softgoods design and features (e.g., on/off clutching).

What we couldn’t know from those early experiments was how much that offloading would matter after workers wore exosuits for years in the real world.

That’s why converging evidence matters. No single exoskeleton study carries that much weight.

But when evidence converges across researchers, methods, environments, and years?

That’s when a collection of studies starts becoming an evidence base.

And ultimately, I think that’s the bigger milestone here—not 40+ publications, but how much more we can now say with confidence than when this journey started.

Huge thanks to the global scientific community that continues to rigorously study, challenge, and advance this technology; and to all those using and advancing this tech in industry. Truly a team effort. 🙏🏽

#exoskeletons #ergonomics #biomechanics