my country has a huge demand for rehabilitation. How can we ignite the exoskeleton robot market?

It is reported that 460 million people in China have rehabilitation needs. In particular, during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, China will enter a moderate aging stage, and the population over 65 years old will exceed 14%. There are currently 250 million elderly people in my country, and 40 million disabled or semi-disabled elderly people.

In the medical field, postoperative rehabilitation is a rigid market. For example, through postoperative rehabilitation treatment, stroke patients are likely to recover their motor function from hemiplegia and return to society as a normal person.

Faced with such huge market potential in the rehabilitation scenario, Maibu fell into deep thought.

Why has the influx of capital not yet exploded?

With the overall popularity of the robotics field in recent years, exoskeleton robots have also attracted the attention of more and more investment institutions. Since 2020, institutions such as SoftBank, Lenovo Capital, Sihuan Pharmaceutical, Star Fund, Shangyuan Fund, BlueRun Ventures, Fortune Capital, and Poly Capital have entered the market.

However, as far as the entire track is concerned, exoskeleton robots are still a very young track. Although many investment institutions have already made their plans, they have not yet exploded on a large scale.

Why is this so? In the opinion of Maibu Robot, there are two main reasons:

First, what problems do exoskeleton robots solve?

Second, whether the problem it solves has reached a critical point.

Traditional exoskeleton robots only solve the problem of walking and are walking aids, but they do not have rehabilitation and treatment capabilities, so they cannot obtain medical equipment. In the past three years, some leading companies have been able to provide relatively clear rehabilitation treatment for patients with central nervous system injuries, so they have been able to transform from walking aids into rehabilitation equipment.

After solving this problem, a new problem arises: At what cost can we reach the critical point of scale?

The early cost of a set of foreign exoskeleton robots was as high as 300,000 to 400,000 US dollars, and the current cost is basically more than 100,000 US dollars per set, and domestic companies generally charge 200,000 to 300,000 RMB per set. Therefore, rehabilitation exoskeleton robots are still high-end medical devices, and their costs have not yet reached the critical point of scale, which is also the key to their inability to be popularized.

The entire industry is looking forward to the emergence of such a company to open up a new era for the explosion of exoskeleton robots.

What kind of team can detonate the market?

The team that will detonate the entire market in the future must be this kind of team: first, it must have cross-disciplinary cross-border capabilities; second, it must have the ability to create popular products with high cost-effectiveness and excellent rehabilitation effects.

First of all, the key is to return to the underlying technical capabilities and products. The focus of future market competition will still be whether the product is truly effective. If the team has solid underlying technical capabilities, the next step is to extend to more scenarios, which is also the most imaginative opportunity in the future of the exoskeleton robot track.

From a technical perspective, exoskeleton robots will become more and more data-driven in the future. They will no longer be stand-alone devices that can be operated by pressing A to move the left leg and B to move the right leg. With the help of a large amount of data on the device, it can even combine the body's movement characteristics (such as rehabilitation status, central nervous system feedback) with the brain-computer interface to form a massive data application platform, which will also become an important basis for continuous iteration and optimization of products.

In the mind of every person who takes the step, there is such an imagined scenario: in hospitals and rehabilitation institutions, patients only need to swipe their medical record card on the exoskeleton robot with a "beep" sound, and all body data will be automatically matched and converted into the patient's usage mode. Everything is so simple.

Secondly, after having the underlying foundation around technology and products, whether the entrepreneurial team has the ability to innovate in business models.

At present, users’ payment logic is gradually becoming clearer, and “Rehabilitation as a Service (RaaS)” will be increasingly accepted by users.

In addition, Maibu Robotics believes that all teams engaged in the research and development of exoskeleton robots should pay attention to the three key words: "quality, efficiency, and accessibility."

• Quality refers to whether the product can achieve the same use effect as the domestic and foreign products it is benchmarked against.
• Efficiency refers to how quickly the product can be pushed to target scenarios such as hospitals, elderly care and rehabilitation institutions.
• Universal access refers to how products can reduce production costs and increase the popularity of corresponding rehabilitation equipment.

In short, the commercialization problem needs to be solved by the whole industry together. In the future, there will be a large number of exoskeleton robot companies in various vertical market segments, presenting a flourishing state.