Manual handling: could this robotic ‘muscle suit’ remove the risks?

Safety & Health Practitioner

A company in Japan is making a robotic heavy lifting suit commercially available for the first time next month. Initially, the company is aiming to sell them into sectors involving a lot of manual handling, but its inventor, Hiroshi Kobayashi, believes that elderly and disabled people could be using them in their homes by the end of the decade.

What do you think? Could this make back problems a thing of the past?

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Mark Cody

9 years ago

Interesting Video but how can industry afford such Bionic machines. There will be issues with Safety and Risk assessments on both the machine the user and the tasks involved.

The Manual Handling Operational Regulations set specific legal requirements to ensure that employees undertaking manual handling operations at work avoid the risk of injury. If this machine was to injure somebody then I can see complications with ‘who is responsible’ !

Enjoyed the video!

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