The device arrived in a small styrofoam suitcase. It plugs into the same USB-C cable I use to charge my Macbook, and syncs with my phone as easily as Airpods. And yet, the Hypershell exoskeleton promises something no consumer device released has before: to increase my leg strength by 40% and reduce exertion by 30% for up to 10 miles at a time.

Hypershell was founded by Kelvin Sun, an engineer who launched several robotics projects and founded Lattepanda, a company that produced tiny motherboards for computers. In 2022, Hypershell graduated out of China’s Y Combinator, and the company now employs about 100 people across Beijing and Shenzhen. By 2023, the idea raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, alongside “several million” in angel investing, followed by an undisclosed Series A in 2024.

After this long lead up, the Hypershell—in three models starting at €899—will be the first major consumer exoskeleton to go on sale on January 20. I was sent one of the first test units to try out, and an icy Midwest day gave me the perfect opportunity to imagine what life with an exoskeleton might look like. 

Unboxing the Hypershell

The device feels like the sci-fi fantasy of a fanny pack, with its skeleton folding down your hips and legs from a hefty waist-worn belt. This is the color, material, and finish of thoughtful hardware rather than a barebones Kickstarter project, with liberal amounts of nylon padding at every touch point to your person. 

Donning the device over your clothes takes just a few minutes. A connected app first asks your height, weight, and gender, then shows each step to getting dressed in a video, while you tighten belts and adjust clips much like a backpack. When I finally hold the power button placed conveniently at my hip, the inert machine springs to life, assuring me it’s present by pressing ever so slightly into my lower back. I ignore commentary from my family that it looks like I’m wearing “a bionic diaper.”

Taking my first step is a surprise. It feels like my leg is being puppeted and pulled, as if my knee is on a string. As I increase the level of assistance—doing so simply requires a few button taps near my leg—that feeling of puppeting only increases. I find myself high stepping like I’m in a marching band across my kitchen. Is it easier to walk? Hmm . . . well, it’s certainly easier to kick my leg in front of me, if that makes sense. 

As I step outside, tentatively, onto my icy sidewalk to shovel, I’m shocked at how balanced I feel in spite of this machine operating with a two millisecond delay to each of my movements. Unfortunately, the extra power in my legs does nothing to help break through the sheet of ice with my puny biceps. I find myself imagining how an upper body add-on could help make this task easier. (A bicep diaper, if you will.) That sounds absurd, of course—me, walking down my suburban block like I’m Matt Damon in Elysium. Yet, all of my neighbors already own a snowblower. I wonder, what if we treated our bodies as the power tools instead? 

Giving up on my sidewalk, I decide to try out a run (the system promises to automatically recognize and support about any outdoor activity, including climbing). With a bit more confidence, I switch into running shoes and hit the wet streets. I turn the assistance all the way up and start to jog. My legs are suddenly those of an action figure, scissoring forward and back almost automatically with my stride. I want to enjoy the mindless power, but it’s hard to imagine running like this for long. I’m not sure my legs want to be yanked forward. And I still feel the weight of the device in my back, and tightening the waist belt doesn’t seem like enough to make the task comfortable—like I’m wearing a pair of pants that doesn’t quite fit. Turning off the Hypershell, I enjoy the freedom for my legs, but also realize how much of Hypershell’s job is supporting its own 5.2 lbs of weight.

Heading back inside my house, I kick off my shoes and try going up and down my stairs. Here, I actually had a harder time noting the merits of the system than I did walking or running. Granted, I tested this in a limited capacity of my house in the middle of winter. But whereas when I tried the Skip MO/GO exoskeleton last year, I could feel myself bounding up stairs, the Hypershell felt like it helped lift my leg onto the step but not actually propel my muscles to lift the rest of my body. The MO/GO also absorbed all of the impact of going down the stairs (hallelujah to my knees!), whereas the Hypershell’s assistance was more difficult to detect. It’s hard to say why these differences exist between two similar looking products . . . is it the hardware itself, the algorithms guiding it, and/or my own flawed perception? 

Frankly, it’s about impossible to know—each step is the biomechanical equivalent to when you see some story on Instagram, it disappears, and you can’t ever find it again. (When I asked Hypershell about this matter, they offered some tips to tweaking the level of assistance in their excellent app which did help a bit, but noted that I’d likely feel more benefit on steep hills than stairs.)

Hypershell’s algorithms promise to tune themselves to your gait over time, meaning that the device might feel different to wear day-to-day. And like every other product, the Hypershell will receive firmware updates. During testing, one such firmware update came through, and a Bluetooth sync with my phone fixed several issues including, “bending over while climbing stairs could easily trigger a wear detection failure.”

What makes an exoskeleton good?

Therapeutic exoskeletons have been approved by the FDA for nearly a decade now. But to make matters trickier, the new wave of exoskeletons are coming to the market as sporting gear, which isn’t regulated beyond flammability. That’s fine for golf clubs when all that’s at stake is shanking a ball off the tee, but these are products connecting to and moving some of the most fraught parts of our bodies.

However, as these consumer-facing startups inevitably make their way into more clinical settings—helping rehabilitation after strokes, or keeping an aging population more mobile than they might otherwise be—exoskeletons will (thankfully) face more scrutiny. This is not a critique on Hypershell per se—which does partner with organizations like Shenzhen’s respected Sustech University—but something to be mindful of in this new industry.

When I reach out to Steven Collins, the director of Stanford’s Biomechatronics Lab for his thoughts on exoskeleton safety, he isn’t so concerned about our joint health or the biomechanical risk.

“We don’t know for sure yet [if they’re safe], because we don’t have longitudinal use data, but I would expect these devices to have similar risks as exercise equipment, bicycles, and similar products,” he writes over email. “My personal opinion is that this class of products, as currently constituted, does not pose a substantial new health risk.”

But he does add that the field could use more regulation.

“My main concern here is actually that manufacturers may overstate the performance of their devices,” Collins continues. “We have seen [exoskeleton] ads suggesting much higher torque and power than possible, along with much larger improvements in speed or energy cost than have been demonstrated in the best laboratory tests, without any data to support the claims. I’d like to see more regulation of misleading advertising as to the benefits of these devices.”

I was surprised that the feature I most liked most didn’t help me walk more easily, but was one that Hypershell labeled an “experiment” in the app. It was a Fitness mode, which actually added resistance to my steps. The idea of a machine tuning our own performance—to make us stronger in both the immediate and long term—is an exciting one. And I hope it won’t be on users for long to figure out if these systems really benefit them or might come with unknown consequences to our own biomechanics.

For now, I’m one-part impressed by the Hypershell, and one-part remiss to recommend anyone try it for more than the sake of trying it. This is a highly polished v 1.0 product that is mind-boggingly impressive when you break down its mix of simple UX, rugged build that can operate at freezing temperatures, and real-time AI assistance. But we are still a ways from the perfect exoskeleton: a system that makes you feel stronger, faster, and still fully like yourself.