I Tested A Speedsuit That Makes Anyone Run Faster

[Amit] Here's me running normally

and here's me running with a robotic exo suit.

If you look closely, you can see how it's making my knees

lift higher and my posture more upright.

So what is this thing?

Well, you know that feeling of running downhill,

where you're not fully in control of your own speed,

but you feel like you could run forever?

That's the idea behind this wearable robot.

It basically forces you to move your legs faster

by learning from your natural movements and correcting them.

Some questions.

How does it work?

Why does it exist?

How much faster can I get?

Is it easy to use?

And will wearing this make me super human?

[footsteps thump]

I'm not much of an athlete.

[Amit pants]

You'll usually find me here, here, or here.

I'm Amit Katwala.

I'm a writer and editor for Wired

and I've always been fascinated by technology

and how it can enhance human performance.

I even wrote a book about the overlap

between neuroscience and sport.

When I heard about an exo suit

that can make people run faster, I knew I needed to try it,

but first I needed to get a baseline

of my own unassisted performance.

I asked Adam Gemili, an Olympic sprint coach

and Team GB Olympian to give me some brutal feedback

on my current technique.

Let's have a look.

Yeah, so obviously first of all,

your hip flexors are very tight.

You can see that.

You can barely get your knee.

There's no knee lift there.

The improvements for me, I'd say bringing your thighs up

a little bit higher, you need to start pumping your arms.

You're losing a lot of power there.

Your arms should be sort of at 90 degrees

and you should be able to swing them back and forth

to really generate that power

and get off the track a lot quicker,

and stay in the air a lot longer,

and move a lot faster.

I think with the arms, I think what I was doing

was just trying to mimic what I've seen.

You know what I mean, with no real sort of like.

Absolutely.

Oh sprinters, when they sprint, they run,

they move their arms like this.

So that's what I was doing.

It needs to be at that 90.

It needs to be at that 90 degrees,

at least coming up to eye level.

And also when you go backwards,

look at that sort of stopping at the side of your body,

you can see it's not really coming up.

The hand is sort of like level with the hip,

and it should be past the hip at 90 degrees,

and that will influence what your lower legs do as well.

But not a bad run at all, to be honest with you.

Not a bad baseline and pretty naturally athletic,

even if maybe you've not sprinted before.

It's a really nice running technique

and a really nice running style.

So no good job.

Not too bad at all, not too bad.

Thanks, I don't think anyone's ever called me

naturally athletic before, so I feel happy about that.

[Adam laughs]

I showed Adam footage of the suit in action.

It's quite an interesting idea, this thing,

it's almost like over speed training,

and it's pushing your body to a place

that it might not necessarily naturally get to.

But once your body's been somewhere,

we'll find a way to get there again.

I'd expect with this exo suit for you to take

at least a second off that 100 meters.

[Amit] Now a second might not seem like a lot,

but at an elite level where tenths of seconds matter,

a one second increase is incredibly significant.

[engine whirs]

[GPS voice speaks Korean]

Before I could test the suit on the track,

I needed to try the robot in the Heurotics lab

in Seoul, South Korea.

There we can get a baseline for my performance

and the robot can learn from my technique.

So here I am at the lab where I'm going to learn

about how the suit works.

So they're attaching motion capture dots to me

that the cameras around the room are gonna pick up

so that they can analyze my running style.

I feel like I'm in a video game.

It's quite cool.

This is the same technology they use

for motion capture on sports games and things like that.

On the computer over there,

they're going to be able to use these dots

and these cameras to map my gait,

both with and without the suit,

and compare how my running style changes

when I'm running in the suit

and when I'm running without the suit.

So we are just going to start motion capturing

your unassisted running posture.

[treadmill whirs] [footsteps thump]

Yep, so I need to pump my arms.

Remember to pump my arms.

This is pretty quick by my standards.

Okay.

Now that we have my natural running gait captured,

it is time to get into the suit.

Also, I feel quite sort of trussed up, like packaged in.

So it's quite tight around my thighs and like round here.

When you tighten the straps on the backpack

and it kind of goes like up like that,

that's what it feels like.

Just like I'm kind of wearing an item of clothing, really.

Crucial part of this robot, one, is this motor,

and two is the AI model inside of here.

This is the brain of the human.

This is the muscle of the human.

This brain analyzes the real-time running posture

by measuring your running data.

This is the cable which pulls your leg higher.

And it also has a sensor measuring your pulling force

in the real time.

This motion sensor measures your running posture

and the running balance, everything.

[Amit] Okay, I'm suited up and ready to try this again.

[motor whirs]

So I dunno if you can hear that, but that's quite loud.

It sounds like there's a hair dryer.

I feel like a piece of meat wrapped in string.

[Amit laugsh]

Okay.

Okay, so I can feel the suit kind of puffing away.

I don't think it's quite synced up to me yet,

but okay, here we go.

So now it's syncing up with me.

It feels like it's kind of pushing my legs forward

a bit more as I'm running.

I can see my knees going up more

than they would've done normally.

It's adapting dynamically to what I'm doing,

but I feel quite stable, actually, after that.

I was worried I was gonna be sort of out of control,

and I'm still a little bit out of breath,

but it felt a bit like running downhill.

Where you're not quite fully in control of your own speed,

but you've got a bit of a bit of assistance.

You kind of feel your legs almost moving faster

than the rest of your body.

That's what it felt like, a little bit.

We're about to go up to five meters per second,

so 20% faster.

[machine whirs] [footsteps thump]

Okay, here we go.

All right.

Okay, the treadmill's kicked in

and the suit is kicking in as well.

And there it goes.

That's the suit really kicking into gear.

You've got even faster and tighter.

And now it's really helping me out.

It's like synced up with my running style.

I'm gonna try and my arm a bit more to keep up with it.

[machine whirs] [footsteps thump]

Yeah, it feels pretty good actually,

but it's still not that easy.

I feel all right, actually.

I don't feel nearly as out of breath as I did

last time I did it without the suit.

But let's look at the data and see how we got on.

Is that my skeleton?

Yeah, it's your skeleton.

[Amit] What values are you able to see with the software?

Hip flexion angle, angular velocity, and hip joint power,

hip joint movement, and ground reaction force.

So first I'll show you the hip flexion angles.

The red solid line is without the suit

and the blue solid line is with the suit.

Wow, so you can really see a big improvement there.

Wow, that's amazing.

So that's almost a 10 degree improvement.

[Junyoung] Yeah, that's right.

[Amit] Is that quite big?

[Junyoung] Yeah, it's really big.

So this is without the suit.

[Junyoung] That's right.

[Amit] You can see my knees are getting up okay.

[Junyoung] Your pelvis just leans.

Oh yeah, so my pelvis is leaning forward like that.

You can see it on the skeleton.

So then switch to the with the suit.

[Junyoung] Yeah, sure.

[Amit] Oh yeah, and you can see it's much straighter,

isn't it?

[Junyoung] Yeah, that's right.

After you're wearing the suit,

your body just gets straight.

Yeah, so then when I put my foot down,

it's going more down, straight down into the ground,

rather than kind of going backwards like that.

With the exo suit on, my posture improved.

When I put my feet down while wearing the suit,

they went straight into the ground,

so my next stride had more power.

Wearing the exo suit improved my gait cycle time

by almost 40%.

So I'm taking fewer steps for longer.

Yeah, that's right.

That's a massive difference.

Now armed with the H Fit exo suit

and my expert guidance from Adam,

I went out to the Seoul National University track

to try it out.

So I'm about to run 100 meters on the athletics track

without the suit.

Junyoung is gonna be timing me using this timing pad

and then these split timers all the way down

to the end of the track, and they're gonna use that

to help analyze my performance.

[Instructor] Three, two, one, run!

[stopwatch ticks] [footsteps thud]

[intense music continues]

[timer chimes]

[Amit pants]

So I've just finished my 100 meters without the suit

and now I'm here with Kyungsoo,

who's a Korean national sprinter,

and Jooeun, he's a professor of sports engineering

and part of the team that built the suit.

So Kyungsoo, what did you make of my running technique?

[Kyungsoo speaks Korean]

It's quite funny to see today.

[Kyungsoo speaks Korean]

You should have flexed your hip further,

but it looked like you are more dependent on your ankles

instead of hip.

[Amit] And what about my arms?

Were my arms okay?

[Kyungsoo speaks Korean]

So it looked like you depended too much on your hands,

and your hands look like very stiff.

So I mean he commented to just relax your hands further.

[Kyungsoo speaks Korean]

So I'm doing this and I should be doing this.

Perfect.

[intense music begins]

Can this suit shave a second or more

off my 100 meter time?

We're about to find out.

And can it do it when it's minus 10 and blizzarding?

[intense music continues]

You can see the snow.

It's very beautiful.

It's like a Christmas card,

but I have to run as fast as I can in this weather,

so we'll see how that goes.

[intense music continues]

Two, one, go!

[intense music continues] [stopwatch clicks]

Let's go!

[intense music continues] [stopwatch clicks]

[timer chimes]

[Crew] How was it?

[Amit pants]

That felt really good.

That felt a lot quicker.

Yeah, I feel like I really hopefully shaved some time off.

Yeah, it definitely helped me out,

especially in the middle section.

I could really feel it like pumping with me.

It got a bit outta sync at times,

but overall I think it really, really helped.

What did you guys think?

Did it look good?

You got 15.7.

15.7, so I shaved half a second of my time.

Yeah, yeah.

That's amazing.

That's so good.

Again, half a second might not seem like a lot,

until you remember that it was half a second faster

than my previous best, despite the Sub-Zero weather

and having spent all day running on the treadmill.

I'm also wearing additional layers.

So even matching my speed would've been an achievement.

But with the suit on, I beat it.

As Adam said, maybe I'm more of a natural athlete

than I thought.

Or maybe it's just the suit.

[upbeat music continues]