Movewear 101 - what it is and how it solves the mobility challenges of the 21st century

1 in 4 Americans are living with knee pain. 1 in 3 Americans are on the obesity spectrum. Americans over 65 will outnumber those under 18 in the next decade. Skip’s Kathryn Zealand recently wrote a post about the spiraling mobility challenges this is creating and the impacts on our physical, mental, and societal well-being.

So let’s talk about solutions!?Mobility is about as complex and systemic a space as it gets, so a variety of approaches has a role to play.

At Skip, we believe the most meaningful way to make progress on mobility is through products that are 1) wearable, 2) powered, and 3) designed for the “missing middle” of users that has historically been overlooked. These products are going to fundamentally change how we think about movement in the coming decade - they’re called “movewear”.

Movewear is worn

There are plenty of mobility aids on the market today: hiking poles, canes, walkers, crutches… They are all pretty decent for what they’re designed for - providing support when leaned on. But by virtue of living off-body, they are inherently foreign and limited.

• They occupy our hands and require energy - both physical and mental - to hold and wield, detracting from what we’re trying to do in the moment.?
• They each have unique constraints on where and how they can be used - wheels that need to stay on smooth ground and bulk that limits how far we can bring them, adding new barriers to movement while trying to eliminate others.
• They can’t learn our movement histories or sense our unique movement needs, capping their usefulness.

Movewear supports you in a radically new way by resting comfortably on-body - it learns your movement needs over time, accompanies you anywhere you wish to venture, frees up your hands and mind, and fades into the background so you forget it’s there. Wearables design has come a long way in the last fifty years - let’s finally start applying those learnings where it matters most!

Movewear is powered

Many devices know us intimately - they track our steps, our calories burned, our heart rate, our sleep, our stress, our menstrual cycles. But that is really all they do. They track.

Sometimes that can be helpful. Sometimes these “sensing” wearables even lead to behavior change as we motivate ourselves to get moving, knowing that we’re being “watched”. But this behavior change is usually short-lived. In over 30% of cases, the wearable is back in our drawer a few months later and we’re back to our old selves.

When it comes to movement, the hardest thing isn’t to know that you haven’t walked much today or that your heart rate got so high walking up the last hill that you had to turn back - it’s getting the support to keep going! Behavior change requires not just a shift in our motivation to move but a boost in our abilities. Something to support us, to ease the pain and the burn, to make it more feasible and more fun to keep going. The latest research by some of our academic partners has shown that to be meaningfully helpful when it comes to movement, the boost delivered needs to be ~20% or more of what you’re able to perform independently.

Movewear can do this. It has the intelligence to understand how you’re moving and the compute power to evaluate what kind of boost you might need most, but most critically its wearable motors have the “horsepower” to move you past the limits you’re running up against.?

Movewear is designed for the "missing middle"?

Technology often follows a familiar dynamic of starting at the extremes before finding its way to more mainstream user needs. For decades we were focused on designing new un-powered pedal bicycles at one end of the spectrum and motor bikes at the other. This changed in 1992 when the Dolphin Electric Bike came around with its pedal assist, giving people the combined benefit of pedaling exercise and the leisure of motor assist. Last year there were over 1M e-bikes sold in the US - double the number of motorbikes.

Movewear brings this “missing middle” philosophy to the mobility space. Millions of people are mobile and excited to keep “doing the work” when it comes to recreation and movement, but need a boost to take that extra walk to walk the dog park or get to that summit on their hike. Devices that are both wearable and powered have existed for a while - they are known as “exoskeletons”. But they have generally glossed over the consumer market, designed instead for users at the most extreme ends of the movement distribution - soldiers running hundreds of miles with giant packs on their backs (e.g. Lockheed Martin), warehouse workers repeatedly lifting hundreds of pounds at the job site (e.g. Ottobock), or people living with medical conditions like spinal cord injuries needing full body-weight support and 100% assistance to walk (e.g. ReWalk). This has led to products that are very useful for some but miss the mark for most everyday people looking for support as they move through the real world.?

Movewear bridges this gap - it takes inspiration from exoskeleton technology and elevates it into a new kind of consumer product that is useful, understandable, comfortable, and exciting for everyday people in search of a little boost. Much like e-bikes sit between pedal bikes and motorbikes, movewear sits between clothing and exoskeletons to provide that critical bit of support.?

So does this make Movewear a new product category?

The classic definition of a new product category is: a set of products that either a) solves a new problem users didn’t know they had or b) solves an existing problem in a radically new way.?

Movewear is solving an age-old problem, as anyone living with any movement challenge will immediately tell you. But its approach to solving that problem is different from anything that’s come before. I’m a firm believer that the most powerful driver of innovation is recombining existing ideas in new ways. Movewear takes learnings from disparate industries and applies them to a new segment of the population in a highly unique way:

• The deep tech learnings of the exoskeleton space around how to transfer forces (power) to the body effectively
• The algorithmic approaches of the machine learning space for how to understand and interpret data (movement data in this case) to augment users in ways that feel natural, desirable, and trustworthy
• The human factors learnings of what makes a supremely comfortable wearable device
• The UX and industrial design learnings of the consumer tech space about what makes an easy-to-use, good-looking product that helps drive meaningful behavior change

I am incredibly excited to see that there are companies out there that are already starting to build movewear products! The tremendous need is evident from the success recent kickstarter campaigns like Hypershell 1 and Dnsys X1 have had - products targeting everyday consumers and speaking our language when explaining their benefits with phrases like “an e-bike for walking”. Manufacturing and shipping on-time seems to have been a challenge for these nascent companies, but I can’t wait to try their products when they do eventually ship.

Our approach to movewear design at Skip is quite different from all of these other companies in a few key ways. Stay tuned for a post in the coming days where we explain our product philosophy in this emerging category! And follow us to be the first to hear our product announcement later this summer.