Hurotics

A team led by Kang Ji-yeon of GIST's AI department, with Optonics and Chonnam National University Hwasun Hospital, has built Pilates-Bot, a cable-driven robot that sits beside a hospital bed and helps bedridden patients raise and spread their legs while lying down, GIST said on Oct 15 according to Robot Newspaper (irobotnews). The heavy motors sit on wheeled frames beside the bed and pull light cables attached to a leg brace, and an Assist-Resist-as-Needed control scheme helps only when the user falls behind the target path and resists when the user can move unaided. In a test with eight healthy adults, the report said, the controller raised muscle electrical activity by 73% and resistance force 3.5 times against assist-only control while keeping range of motion and accuracy; the work was presented at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh (Sept 27 to Oct 1) as "Assist-Resist-as-Needed Robotic Control for Cable-Driven Bedside Training". The prototype is finished and the team is preparing performance and safety tests for medical-device approval. Rehabilitation is one of the Korean categories MEKAWIRE tracks most closely, alongside Angel Robotics and Hurotics in wearable gait robots.

Korean wearable-robot startup Hurotics has raised a KRW 25 billion Series A with Atinum Investment as the main investor, lifting its cumulative funding above KRW 33.5 billion, StartupN reported on Oct 15; the company had not posted its own release at the time of writing, so the figures are unconfirmed. The money is earmarked for overseas approvals and distribution of its H-Medi gait rehabilitation exosuit and for developing and producing H-Care, a daily walking-assist suit.

Korea's Public Procurement Service said in a press release on Oct 8 that it has selected Angel Robotics as the first company in its new Innovative Procurement Top Tier programme, which will pick one company a month from firms whose innovative products went through government trial purchases. The agency said it assessed results after the trial purchase together with technology, growth potential, public value and public approval, and cited the on-site trial results of Angel's wearable robot, which detects a wearer's intention to walk to support rehabilitation, as well as its overseas expansion and wider commercialisation. Selected companies get promotion, awards and exhibition support, the agency said; the release gave no contract values. KOSDAQ-listed Angel Robotics is one of three Korean wearable-robot makers MEKAWIRE tracks, alongside WIRobotics and Hurotics, whose KRW 25 billion Series A was reported on Oct 15.

A team led by Professor Im Chang-hwan of Hanyang University's Department of Biomedical Engineering said on Oct 8 that, together with the Hyundai Motor and Kia Robotics Lab, it controlled the X-ble MEX lower-limb wearable robot in real time with a hybrid brain-computer interface, in work published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering (DOI 10.1109/TNSRE.2026.3729803), Robot Newspaper (irobotnews) reported. Instead of pressing buttons on a crutch handle, the user wears AR glasses showing four options (single step, continuous walking, turn left, turn right); a wireless dry-electrode EEG headband detects which option the user is looking at, a one-eye wink picked up as an electro-oculogram signal executes it, and clenching the jaw, read by EMG, cancels or stops. In trials with ten healthy adults walking a set route, turning and sitting down, the team reported 95.06% average EEG selection accuracy, F1 scores of 99.80% for winks and 99.22% for jaw clenches, a usability score of 78.25 against 53.50 for the crutch-button method, and a drop in perceived physical workload from 7.85 to 3.15. Four of the eight authors are from the Hyundai-Kia Robotics Lab, which develops the X-ble line; the study used healthy volunteers, not paraplegic users. It is the second brain-signal rehabilitation robot in MEKAWIRE's Korean coverage this week, after Dynamic Solution's BCI hand on Oct 15, alongside Hurotics' KRW 25bn round for wearable gait suits.

Daejeon logistics-robot maker Twinny issued 1,376,982 new common shares at KRW 14,355 each in three third-party allotments between August and September, according to notices on its website, about KRW 19.8 billion in total by MEKAWIRE's calculation. The first allotment of 1,000,808 shares, worth about KRW 14.4 billion, matches the pre-IPO round that Korea Economic Daily reported on Sept 14 at a KRW 204.4 billion post-money valuation, up from KRW 120 billion at the March Series C.