HE grew up on a diet of cyborg comics and hums the Terminator theme while working in his lab. Now, Yoshiyuki Sankai is about to realise his dream by creating a generation of bionic grannies and grandads.

For decades Professor Sankai, a world expert on robotically-assisted limbs, has been developing the concept of a full body suit for the elderly that will dramatically increase the strength of its wearer. Yesterday he unveiled the HAL5, a working prototype that more than doubles the power of its user’s arms and legs.

One of his students marched into the Tsukuba University cybernetics centre under the mechanical assistance of HAL5, a surprisingly streamlined framework of metal spokes and motors that fits over normal clothes. The whole kit, which costs about the same as a compact car, includes blue flashing lights for effect and looks uncannily like every Hollywood director’s image of what a bionic suit should be.

Its abilities, though, are strikingly non-fictional — a person capable of lifting 90kg (198lb) in a gym could lift around 200kg wearing the suit. The arm strength, for example, was demonstrated by making the wearer hold three 10kg sacks of rice in one outstretched arm.

“I’m not feeling any strain at all,” he said, pointing to a heart-rate monitor that showed only a negligible change. “We’ve tested this and I can basically hold the rice in this position for as long as the batteries last — about three hours.”

Equally empowered with HAL5’s bionic legs, the professor says that people would not notice the aches and pains of old age, and could continue life as normal.

The suit works by converting tiny muscle movements into mechanical effects. Eight sensors are attached to the user’s skin and the data they collect is passed on to a corresponding number of powerful motors hidden in the suit. The exact working of these motors is, says the professor, the most secret part of the project.

Tsukuba University — the top technological research institution in Japan — is no stranger to commercialising the fruits of its research, and the HAL5 suit is expected to be no exception. With this in mind Professor Sankai has already established a company that will eventually sell the suits.

In a few weeks dozens of versions of the suit will be given to hospitals to assist patients recovering from debilitating injuries. Professor Sankai’s grander vision is to use the suits to answer Japan’s most pressing economic and social problem: the plunging birthrate and rapid ageing of the population. He believes that, at the current rate of ageing, Japanese companies faced with a shrinking workforce will be obliged to retain employees into their late 60s and even early 70s.

In manufacturing industries, Professor Sankai argues, this strategy will be possible only if elderly workers toil with artificially boosted strength.

“There are so many problems Japan faces because of the ageing problem, and the HAL project will answer those,” he said. “The suit will allow elderly people to fend for themselves much later into their retirement, and means that people do not become bed-ridden so soon in life.”

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