As well as helping lift weight, the arm can also be locked into any position with a ratchet brake to hold an object steady without any exertion from the user.

JD Albert, an engineer and co-founder of E-Ink, calls the Titan Arm “exciting,” but adds: “I would caveat that with the fact that it’s a very tough product to launch for a lot of reasons … it needs to feel right (and) I think there’s also some pretty significant safety concerns … We are taking a piece of machinery and integrating it with a person and so naturally you need to make sure that there’s no way to injure someone.”

Still, Albert says that for young engineers, the Titan Arm represents an impressive achievement: “They’ve managed to combine a pretty wide variety of disciplines both dealing the mechanical side of things — the design and the electrical — and the software side of things as well.”