The future is here! And without a hint of irony from the Japanese company, Cyberdyne. Cyberdyne was originally the name of the fictional AI company in the Terminator series. The fictional Cyberdyne created Skynet, the evil AI that nukes the world and starts making evil robots to kill everyone.
The non-fictional Cyberdyne is a company that makes robotic aids for limb movement. Continuing their trend of naming things after evil robots, their main product is called HAL. Not the evil AI from 2001, instead it stands for Hybrid Assistive Limb.
The HAL helps people in two different ways. It can be used to enhance strength or to assist with physical rehabilitation. In both cases, HAL is attached to a person on their back, legs, and sometimes arms as well. The HAL exoskeleton reads the wearer’s electrical nerve impulses and the robot limbs copy the movement of the wearer. So if you kick your left leg, the robot exoskeleton kicks its left leg along with you. While you could have a remote connection to HAL to create a robotic clone of yourself, the primary intent is to have enhanced strength and structure for your limbs. Instead of you lifting something, the robot lifts it while being in the same space as you.
For laborers, this allows people to lift far heavier weights than they normally could and in a safer fashion as the exoskeleton takes most of the stress.
For rehabilitation, HAL allows patients to move in ways their muscle mass can’t support after an accident. It can also assist in rebuilding broken neural pathways. If a “walk” nerve signal only reaches your thigh and not your feet, HAL can still hear the signal and move the rest of your leg past your thigh. As HAL moves, the patient’s body relearns how to send the nervous signal the whole way to the foot.
A similar device was used by Kevin Piette when he carried the Olympic Torch during the 2024 Paris Olympics.
I originally learned about Cyberdyne almost ten years ago. I’d always planned on writing about it on the blog, but got immensely sidetracked. Finally time to deliver on that idea!
If you’d like to learn more about Cyberdyne’s HAL you can read and see more on their website: https://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/
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