#430007 ‘Harder, better, faster, ...

What if running the 26.2 miles of a marathon only felt like running 24.9 miles, or if you could improve your average running pace from 9:14 minutes/mile to 8:49 minutes/mile without weeks of training? Researchers at the Wyss Institute and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University have demonstrated that a tethered soft exosuit can reduce the metabolic cost of running on a treadmill by 5.4% compared to not wearing the exosuit, bringing those dreams of high performance closer to reality. "Homo sapiens has evolved to become very good at distance running, but our results show that further improvements to this already extremely efficient system are possible," says corresponding author Philippe Malcolm, Ph.D., former Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Wyss Institute and SEAS, and now Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, where he continues to collaborate on this work. The study appears today in Science Robotics.

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