Radi Kaiof tests the ReWalk. The inventor of ReWalk, Israeli engineer Amit Goffer, learned the hard way that wheelchair mobility is terribly outdated. In 1997, he broke his neck as the result of a fall, and the wheelchair's limitations were experienced by Goffer first hand. He set to work on a design for a wearable exoskeleten, kind of like a battery powered suit of armor for the lower body. When he discovered that a whole body device would need too many batteries and be too heavy to be efficient, he decided to build instead a lower body exoskeleten that depended on the use of crutches as well as motors and batteries. Because Goffer can not use his arms to use the crutches, he will not be able to make use of the ReWalk himself.
The ReWalk is more complicated than it looks. Its 44 pounds of off-the-shelf components are controlled by hundreds of algorithms and codes and sensors that all enable standing, sitting, walking, and even climbing stairs. Radi Kaiof, a ReWalk tester had not walked in 20 years, but when he's strapped into the ReWalk, he's a different man."I speak eye-to-eye with people, not from the bottom up," he says. "There is one life in a wheelchair, and this is a new life."
