Innovations  & technologies

4 Military Innovations That Will Change the Way We Live

Spend time speaking with foot soldiers, and you’ll eventually hear about lugging an overstuffed backpack for miles in terrible weather through rough terrain. But the age‑old problem of overburdened troops is deadly serious: An army on the move can be dangerously slowed and weakened by strain injuries or just by soldiers struggling under their loads.

So the minds at DARPA threw down this gauntlet to the scientific community: Build some kind of wearable contraption that would help combatants transport their burdens. It needed to be thin and supple enough to fit under battle uniforms and equipment.

To come up with a solution, Ignacio Galiana, PhD, and his researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering immersed themselves in studying a simple act we take for granted: walking. They scrutinized the leg muscles’ perfectly timed bursts of energy to understand how a walker might get a little assist. “What we learned,” says Galiana, “is that small changes in timing—just a few milliseconds—could make a difference between assisting and hindering someone.”