You are always right of course, or so you think! Anyway in your 'informed' opinion how long do you think it will be before the exoskeleton is rolled out for those in need of it?
Ok, apologies I was being a bit cranky here and to an extent I think we are talking at cross purposes. The point about technology advances like this is that improvement is incremental. The exoskeleton will already have been refined from this but work will have been ongoing, and the very use here will have revealed huge amounts of areas that can be improved quickly.
Further the use of the technology will benefit more immediately those not in quite such severe paralysis but also for Thibault improvements either in how he controls a wheelchair, or the use of the arms as is covered in the article. These will undoubtedly be improvements for the life of those in this situation. The article presents this as a single problem that needs to be solved because, as with so much of writing about technology, it looks at the big idea. There will be multiple solutions along the way each of which may well improve someone's life.
Walking is one of the things that those developing robots have struggled with for years but it is better than it was ten years ago, and better than it was 3 months ago.
The other issue is that the term 'user friendly' doesn't really apply here in the sense you use it. It's more about usability which may sound like the same thing but isn't. I could have a great user friendly piece of software but if it processed so slowly that it wasn't useful then that would be a usability issue. The much missed Gonnagle of this parish used to bemoan, while we talked in the sacred realm of Babbity's over tankards of the golden elixir, that people didn't take the time to explain clearly what they meant about subjects such as science, and I accept his rebuke here.