A new exoskeleton to support workers in railways maintenance and renewal operations::A back support exoskeleton has been developed at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology—IIT) to improve railway workers’ safety and conditions for heavy manual material handling during maintenance …
This is awesome. Just think of how much this will improve the quality of life if we can reduce the strain of repetitive stress injuries so people can spend more time enjoying their off time rather than just simply recovering from the wear and tear of their day job.
And the owners will use it as an excuse to not hire more workers or increase wages for the more productive current workers
Definitely! There are so many jobs with heavy lifts where something like this could help. Spanning all the way from construction to health care.
I Imagine the companies treat their equipment maintenance about as well as their track maintenance.
How long till we get reports on the first worker being torn limb from limb when their power suit malfunctions from wear?
Exactly what I was thinking. No thanks, I’ll pass. Edit: the most voted post is the happy oblivious one. Ignorance is bliss.
Fuck me for trying to be optimistic, right?
Of course business will try to exploit this to try and squeeze a little more labour from their workers, but what good is it in constantly being negative about developments like this?
I imagine that you would have complained about Henry Ford’s crazy “40 hour work week” as a cynical ploy to drive up auto sales.
Now they’ll never need a sick day!
The only problem is that the rail companies all over the world treat their workers like a consumable item. If they had thousands of dollars spare per each rail worker that money would go immediately to the pockets of the executives. As it mostly does today.
