Elevate Ski Exoskeleton
Roam's idea was simple to say and hard to do: swap the motors and metal in a robotic exoskeleton for air. Pneumatics, not actuators. Their first bet on that idea was skiing, and I worked on turning it into Elevate, a knee exoskeleton you'd actually strap on at a resort.
Roam's founder had worked on the Ekso exoskeleton and came away thinking the whole category had it backwards. Rigid robotics are heavy and expensive. Air muscles are neither. Skiing was the proving ground: a real market with paying customers, willing to strap something unproven to their legs if it meant more runs with less knee pain.
The functional prototype worked, but it looked like something bolted together in a lab, because it was. My job was humanizing it: getting the cuffs, straps, and housing to read as sports equipment instead of medical hardware, without touching what made the mechanism work.
We sketched and prototyped in parallel with Roam's engineers, not after them. Early rigs went straight onto real legs on real slopes, so fit and comfort got tested where they actually mattered: mid-turn, under load, in the cold.
Elevate had to look like ski gear, not a hospital brace. We leaned into the language of ski hardshell boots and bindings: molded panels, visible structure, a color story that belonged on a mountain, not in a clinic.
Elevate launched in 2018 and earned a special mention on TIME's Best Inventions of 2019, with rentals running at resorts across California, Colorado, Utah, Montana, and Idaho. Rentals paused when the pandemic closed the slopes in 2020, and the underlying technology carried forward into Roam's next two products: Forge, an exoskeleton built for the military with Yamaha Motor and Bessemer Venture Partners among its investors, and Ascend, a robotic knee brace for osteoarthritis. Ascend's 2021 clinical study showed a 46 percent average reduction in pain. Roam has raised $21.4M since.
