Verve Motion Blog

The Verve Motion “Origin Story”

4 Minute Read

At Verve Motion, our mission is to power the human workplace with people-centric robotics.

Verve Motion is a team of apparel designers, scientists and engineers who really love robots but love people more. We’ve spent the last decade building a powerful exosuit that is as comfortable to wear as the clothes on your back.

The Challenge: Workplace injuries

Workplace injuries, particularly back injuries, are a major concern in physically demanding jobs such as warehousing. Back injuries are the most common type of occupational injury reported, affecting more than one million U.S. workers annually.

These overexertion injuries have an enormous impact both on workers and businesses.  For the employees, it’s injuries, fatigue, quality of life.  For businesses, it’s the direct and indirect cost of injuries, the reduced productivity, the high turnover associated with many of these physically demanding jobs.

The Solution: SafeLift

Our answer to this challenge is SafeLift, a soft and light exosuit that wears like a backpack and takes 40% of the strain off a worker with every lift of a case, package, or piece of equipment.  This innovative powered suit can be rapidly deployed at scale, requires minimal setup or training, and features a sleek design that fits everyone.

Based on a decade of research funded by the military, Verve Motion was spun out as a commercial venture four years ago.

It all started at Harvard in 2012, when we were awarded a contract to develop the core technology behind our exosuit. A decade later, we’re leveraging that same technology to power and support workers across a wide range of industries and applications, assisting millions of lifts every month and helping our customers lift over 500 million pounds.

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The SafeLift exosuits reduce the load on the lower back. This not only decreases the number of workplace injuries but also cuts down on associated costs including medical costs, insurance premiums, workers' compensation claims, and replacement labor costs.  

These wearable robotic devices are revolutionizing the industrial workplace by providing significant benefits in safety, productivity, employee retention, and morale.  

The following video delves a bit more into the origins of our company, technology, and approach: