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Technological progress has liberated most industrial personnel in developed nations from heavy lifting tasks. Such work remains largely unchanged, however, in the fields of agriculture, manufacturing, and construction, among others. Such tasks are an important issue due to their potential for triggering work-related musculoskeletal disorders. The use of the McKibben artificial muscle has opened the way to the introduction of “muscle suits” - compact, lightweight, reliable, wearable “assist-bots” enabling factory personnel to lift and carry weights greater than conventionally possible.

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This chapter describes an educational system with a tele-operated android robot, named SAYA, that can express human-like facial expressions and perform some communicative functions with its head and eye movements, and it is utilized as a role of a teacher. Two kinds of field experiments were conducted to investigate effectiveness of this educational system in actual educational fields. An experiment was conducted at both an elementary school and a university to estimate age-dependent differences of its effectiveness. The other experiment was carried out to verify whether children's interest, motivation, and concentration to the class, and science and technologies were enhanced.

Exoskeleton systems have been largely developed in spite that quantitative performance estimation has not been reported so far. Consequently, we have been developing the wearable muscle suit for direct and physical motion supports with relevant reports on the performance. The McKibben artificial muscle has introduced “muscle suit” compact, lightweight, reliable, and wearable “assist-bots” enabling users to lift and carry heavy objects. Applying integral electromyography (IEMG), we show the results of quantitative suit performance and posture-preserving efficiency. However, for practical use, lifting seems to be one of the most important tasks for users. We improve the forearm so that the muscle suit assists the user in vertical lifting. Load carrying and lifting experiments show the muscle suit’s effectiveness.