I share research & insights on biomechanics, exoskeletons & wearable tech. Vanderbilt University Professor. HeroWear Co-Founder & Chief Scientist.
📊 New long-term data on how exosuits impact worker back discomfort.
This study randomized 95 warehouse workers (64 exosuit, 31 control) and followed them for ~5 months. My ballpark is this equates to ~35-50K worker-hours within the exosuit group. This RCT (Randomized Controlled Trial) was led by Harvard, with Liberty Mutual and collaborators at other universities.
The study found that consistent exosuit users reported less back discomfort, consistent with prior academic and industry studies.
The key word being CONSISTENT.
Simply assigning an exosuit to a worker did not significantly reduce back discomfort. But in an exploratory analysis, moderate users had 2–3X lower incidence of back discomfort than controls.
This highlights the importance of user acceptance, fit, training, task matching, and how exos are implemented within organizations.
👀 But what really caught my attention was something else:
The 100+ page data supplement reveals just how much of a BEAST this study must have been to run.
I often hear academics express the need for more long-term studies on industrial exos. At a high level, I agree. But I think it’s easy to underestimate the time, resources, and cost required to run a true long-term RCT in actual workplaces.
Randomization in the workplace is a major logistical challenge. Workers leave or change jobs. Operations change. New equipment gets installed. Seasons change.
These types of things happen. A lot. Including during this study.
And there are potentially practical or ethical considerations if randomization means withholding a #safetytech from workers who might benefit.
Ultimately, this study focused on discomfort—not actual injury incidence.
🚨 Even at this scale, it was still far too small to confidently or statistically evaluate changes in injury rates. The authors noted that larger studies are needed to evaluate clinically meaningful changes in workplace injuries.
35-50K hours is equivalent to 18-25 exo users over 1 year. I wouldn't be surprised if a well-powered injury study needed to be 10X this size.
For comparison, some long-term industry studies (natural experiments) evaluating injury outcomes have involved about 300K hours from exo users. This is likely closer to the order of magnitude needed to assess injury impacts.
Regardless, this study adds nicely to the scientific knowledge-base. I particularly appreciated the preliminary analysis seeking to tease out dose-dependent effects of exo usage.
Huge kudos to the authors on this major undertaking, and for adding more long-term evidence into the public domain.
The sheer volume and cost of the work here may also help people understand why RCT studies are uncommon (not just with exos but with ergonomics broadly); and why our state of knowledge necessarily relies on a combination of hundreds of foundational biomechanics & ergonomics studies + long-term industry case studies, rather than formal randomized experiments alone.
#exoskeletons