Amy;

My speakers are fried....any idea how much this thing costs? What a great idea! Do you know when it will become widely available?

Can't watch anything with cheese-music.

I think the video is the 2.0 version of ReWalk. Gen 1 is $85k, and I fully expect the price to drop.

Also, Walter Russell Mead is a treasure.

I cannot imagine how this will look in ten years. Probably won't even be able to tell if someone is wearing it.

See, that's the thing. It needs to be crazy-cheap... Then we can spend the rest of human habitation on Earth making it graceful and reliable. I worry that the limitations of this technology are really, really fundamental... Power supplies for teentsy-weentsy servo motors, etc.

Those things are getting smaller and better all the time. An acquaintance who sometimes comes to the Wednesday Christian men's beer and cigar night is an engineer who is working on one of these that will balance itself so the user won't need crutches. I think one of the many problems he needs to solve to make it practical, as Crid pointed out, is the size of the power supply.

I think the video is the 2.0 version of ReWalk. Gen 1 is $85k, and I fully expect the price to drop. -- BigFire at March 18, 2013 11:30 AM

How much does "an arm and a leg" really cost?

A lower extremity prosthesis (leg) can range in cost from $5,000.00 to $50,000. An upper extremity device (arm) can range from $3,000.00 to $30,000. Why the difference and why not just give everyone the less expensive variation?

If they can get the numbers down to the $50K range for gen II -- the sales will go up. The prices will drop even further as they become even more common, and the company can depend on the maintenance figures and replacements.

But with the number of Iraq/Afghan vets and the possibility of making an upper body prosthetic system, the possibilities are very large.