Exoskeletons Helping to Reduce Injuries

Exoskeletons continue to progress in their ability to help reduce injuries.

Recently, HeroWear, a winner of NSC's Safety Innovation Challenge in 2024, announced that in a study, based on five distribution centers over an 8 to 23-month period, it found that using an exosuit resulted in a 62% reduction in total strain and sprain injuries among workers who wore their exosuit.

This represented a reduction from 10.2% to 3.8% (per 100 workers per year) after the deployment of exosuits.

Other findings include:

Injuries decreased from previously having one every 20,000 work hours to fewer than one every 50,000 work hours — none of which were back injuries.

Worker back injuries decreased without a corresponding increase in work-related musculoskeletal disorders to other parts of the body.

Injury outcomes were tracked among logistics workers in food and beverage, retail, manufacturing, and general warehousing sectors who wore exosuits for 8 and 23 months, encompassing over 311,000 hours of work — the equivalent of 155 full-time workers working over one year. 

Toyota

This finding is similar to what other companies are experiencing. One example is Toyota, an early adopter of exoskeletons. Due to its success with this technology, the company has bought over 500 shoulder exoskeletons across six vehicle assembly plants, integrating them as mandatory PPE.

They did this based on internal studies that indicated a 20% average reduction in muscle load.

Frito-Lay

A 2024 survey, Tackling MSD in Industrial Sectors with Emerging Tech, provided information from a study of Frito-Lay, which used wearables and AI to reduce MSD risk. 

They reported the following results: 

● Reduced improper postures by 72%.
● Decreased injury rates by 19%.
● Reduced lost work time to injuries by 67%.

They also reported that after examining the data, the use of this technology resulted in meaningful behavior change, increased worker safety engagement, and helped reshape the culture towards proactive safety measures.

Future

As studies continue to provide data on the effectiveness of this technology in reducing injuries, many companies will explore how they can integrate it into their workplaces.

The global market for exoskeletons is predicted to reach $1.25 billion by 2030, according to market research firm Grand View Research, in a 2025 article, From Lab to Workplace: How Exoskeletons are Evolving from the Association for Advancing Automation.