With the EMSi suit, REA hopes to reproduce the same muscular stimulation the human body receives on Earth during periods in low gravity. The company developed the suit in collaboration with the Italian space agency (ASI) with technical support from the Politecnico di Bari’s Department of Electrical and Information Engineering.

It is hoped that the suit will enable astronauts to arrest the loss of muscle and bone mass during spaceflight. This kind of technology will be a key part of enabling long-duration spaceflight, with studies finding that astronauts lose up to 1% of their bone mass each month spent in space.