Well-Being HAL Lower Limb Type
Cyberdyne · Japan · 2026
Cyberdyne leg exoskeleton for people in chronic stages, sold outside the medical route: it reads bio-electrical signals from the skin and moves the wearer's own legs during standing and walking practice.
Well-Being HAL Lower Limb Type is the non-medical branch of Cyberdyne's best known machine. The same idea drives both branches: electrodes on the skin pick up the faint bio-electrical traces of the commands the brain sends to the leg muscles, and the powered hip and knee joints move in step with that intention, so the wearer practises walking with their own legs rather than being carried by a machine. What separates this version from the medical one is not the physics but the route to the user. The medical device is prescribed inside a treatment programme and, in Japan, is covered by public health insurance for a defined list of neuromuscular and spinal diseases. This one is rented to facilities for maintenance and function-improvement training of people whose condition is chronic and stable. Cyberdyne offers three frames, and they are not three sizes of one product. HAL-FL08 is the current design: a single unit that fits wearers from 150 to 190 cm and 40 to 100 kg, and weighs about 13 kg for a double-leg build or 9 kg for a single leg. HAL-FL05, still in the catalogue, is the older approach to the same problem — the same height range covered by four separate frame sizes, S through X, at about 14 kg. Between them sits HAL-FL07, a genuinely small frame for wearers 100 to 150 cm tall and 15 to 50 kg, which brings children into the fitting range and weighs 6.5 kg in the single-leg version. Powered range of motion is the same across the family: 20 degrees of hip extension and 120 of flexion, with the knee flexing to 120 degrees. Run time is around an hour on the custom battery. The manufacturer is unusually direct about the limit of the technology. Its own note states that because the device works from bio-electrical signals, a person whose signals cannot be detected properly will not receive the intended assistance and may not be able to use the machine at all. That is a real boundary rather than a legal formula, and it is the reason this exoskeleton is not simply a powered walking frame. Dating this profile required a detour, because Cyberdyne publishes no release date for the well-being line. Its own product page states that this device carries various upgrades over its previous model, and the distinguishing feature of the new generation — one unit covering 150 to 190 cm instead of four frame sizes — matches the medical version that Cyberdyne announced on 20 May 2026, when the new Medical HAL Lower Limb Type C entered rental in Japan. The catalogue therefore dates the current well-being generation to 2026. The line itself is much older: an archived Cyberdyne page from January 2014 describes its ancestor, HAL Lower Limb Type (Non-Medical), at 12 kg with a 60 to 90 minute run time and an 80 kg wearer limit, already certified against the draft ISO 13482 safety standard for personal care robots. The product is available in Japan only, and Cyberdyne does not rent it to individual users.
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