CREDIT: PROVIDED BY ALLISON STEPHENS
Allison Stephens playing beach volleyball while wearing an exoskeleton vest from Levitate, another exoskeleton company.

Within the last year, the Ford Motor Company has been working with Ekso Bionics in creating a new super-suit for it’s employees at their manufacturing plants in the United States. It is called the Ekso Vest, one of the latest designs in development of exoskeleton suits being manufactured.

Along with the medical field and militia, hi-tech exoskeleton suits are rapidly growing as a tool of assistance in the workforce, aiding those whose jobs can be taxing on the body.

These suits may not be all powerful and superpowered like Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit, but what they can do is help workers keep from getting injured.

The Ekso Vest is the culmination of the design team from Ekso and Ford’s ergonomic team in creating a suit that will help prevent workers on the line from getting the injury that causes the most problems for them: shoulder damage.

“We have always struggled at Ford with overhead work. Many in that overhead work get a lot of neck and shoulder issues or complaints from the operators. In the past, our approach has been to minimize the amount of work they can do, such as they can only do 50 per cent of the time of work with their hands above their head. That’s how we managed the risk of injuries,” said Allison Stephens, professor at Fanshawe College’s School of Public Safety.

Stephens, a new professor at Fanshawe, worked at the Ford Motor Company for 31 years before coming to the college to teach at Fanshawe’s advanced ergonomic studies program. She worked as the leader of the exoskeleton project for Ford before retiring. The lead of the team now, Marty Smets, who worked with Stephens and her team at Ford’s ergonomic virtual lab, now keeps Stephens in the loop of what is happening on the project.

Stephens said that around the beginning of 2017, Ford and Ekso began work on creating an exoskeleton suit with an industrialized application for the factory, instead of one focused on recovery after injuries. They wanted to look at easing the burden on the shoulders and neck for those with overhead work. A hard problem to solve for Ford alone, with the Ekso Vest, new doors have been opened.

The focus of the suit is to help aid workers lift their arms above their head to do their jobs. By using a tension spring mechanism that is adjusted to the wearer, the suit kicks in after the arms lift to a certain degree and then does all the heavy lifting from there. Each arm can carry around ten pounds, depending on the person, and is very flexible and non-intrusive in any actions. Each suit costs around $6,500, one of the lower end prices on the market, and requires no electricity to work it.

To test the vests, they ran four units, with volunteers who were willing to use it for a couple of months. From May to June, they were tested for durability, fit and usefulness. However, one of the candidates, a smaller woman, had to stop using the suit after two weeks mostly due for the reason that the vest was too large.

The goal, Stephens said, is to have a suit any employee on the line can wear.

“Our industrial workers come in many sizes. And when they (Ekso) had made it for a paraplegic, an injured person, they would customize it right to that person. Well, we wanted to be able to use it on all our operators that were working overhead, which is probably about 20 to 25 of them. We didn’t want it to be customized to you (the individual), because you might take a different job and we would like to use that piece of equipment on anyone doing the job. We wanted it to be specific to the job and have adjustability. Not be specific to the person,” Stephens said.

In the end, they came out with three sizes of suit, a small, medium, and large, so that they could be adjustable within a certain length of arm and strength of person, creating a more generic size of vest.

Ekso Vest may not give super strength, but it does help increase endurance and lessen fatigue for those wearing it.

Paul Collins, who goes by the name Woody, is one of the four volunteers testing the Ekso Vest in Ford’s Michigan factory. In a video interview by The Verge, a technological news website, he said that the vest has helped him tremendously in the time he has been wearing it.

“The energy level I have now versus what I had before is a hundred percent different. Now when I go home at night and my wife says ‘let’s go somewhere’, I jump up [and] get in the shower. I have more energy to do things around the house. My grandkids come over [and] I can play with them, versus going home plopping down on the couch and feeling like you’re dead until you got to go to sleep and get up and come and do it all over again the next day,” Woody said.

Currently, the plan is to keep the suit solely on injury prevention in the shoulders, but, Ford may be looking into other areas like strengthening the power of the suit to help employees in different areas of the assembly line.

“Right now, it supports and reduces fatigue, it just holds your arm up. But, now it’s got us thinking, could you boost it so that when you are going to lift it (your arm) it lets you lift further? One of the challenges of that is if it’s freestanding, as if it’s a backpack, the human is still supporting that weight. They are working on where it may have a support that goes all the way down to the ground.”

Talks are in process of mass producing the suits for Ford’s other factories, though no talks of any for the Canadian factories as of yet.

Stephens is in talk with the supplier, on demoing the vest to students in the advanced ergonomics course and some industries in the community, demonstrating its role to those who may be able to utilize the vest for their work. She said she hopes it will be a great way for others to see the work of the Ekso Vest and help the company expand their vests into other industries outside the field of manufacturing.