When I arrived at the Honda press briefing at the W hotel in Times Square on Tuesday, a woman from Honda asked me, “What’s your shoe size?” At that point, I knew it was going to be an unusual experience.

In the corner of a small meeting room, I found a display of two devices. One looked like robotic legs pulled from the pages of a manga. The other looked like a mechanical girdle (strapped around a clear mannequin torso). The devices, I was told by David Iida, a Honda spokesman, are meant for people who have difficulty walking.

Aging is an important issue in Japan right now. The population has the world’s highest elderly ratio, which was covered in the Lede blog last year, and many times prior.

Honda has been working on walking assist devices since 1999 out of its Honda Fundamental Research Institute, part of Honda Research and Development. This is the same group that produced HondaJet, which will go on sale later this year, and the Brain-Machine Interface, which I previously suspected was an April Fool’s joke (it’s not).

The two devices Honda had on display on Tuesday were the Body Weight Support Assist (the robotic legs) and the Stride Management Assist (the girdle). Honda officially unveiled them last year in Japan, but has only recently offered “test walks” in the United States. The devices are still in the prototype stage, and Honda does not have a timetable for production, but it’s safe to say they’re at least a couple of years away.

The Stride Management Assist straps around the hip, like a fanny pack. The whole thing weighs 5.6 pounds and is made up of three mechanical parts: a compartment that sits at the small of the back, which contains the control computer and battery, and two small motors that have the diameter of a CD and are positioned at the hipbones. Two splints snap into the motor and strap to the thighs. A sensor in each motor detects the angle of each leg and the computer calculates how much assist to provide each leg to improve the strides.

The mechanical pants from Wallace and Gromit’s “Wrong Trousers” came immediately to mind. But the Stride Management Assist doesn’t move on its own; it only provides subtle assistance when it detects movement. In tests, Honda said that the device had been shown to lower heart rate because it reduces the level of effort, as well as provide greater muscle activity in the hips and lower legs. And users’ bodies eventually develop a wider walking stride after use.

Shoe size came into play for the Body Weight Support Assist, which comes with built-in sneakers that slip on and zip up. The rest of the slender device is pulled up until its tiny seat (smaller than a bicycle seat) reaches your groin. The device reduces the weight of your body on the legs (Honda has programmed it for six pounds of relief in a standing position). As you bend your legs, the device relieves an increasing amount of body weight, up to 17 pounds. “It makes you feel like you weigh less,” said Jun Ashihara, the chief engineer on the project.

The technology found in both devices has a direct lineage to Asimo, Honda’s humanoid robot, which has been in development for nearly 25 years. The team has gone through at least 30 different prototypes of the Body Weight Support Assist alone over the past 10 years, and there’s still work to do before the devices are ready for production. Honda said it hopes to reduce the weight of both devices further, increase the life in the lithium-ion batteries and streamline the overall designs.

While aging might have been the necessity that spawned the walking assist program, there are other uses for them. Honda is testing the Stride Management Assist in a rehabilitation hospital in Japan. The Body Weight Support Assist is being used by Honda workers in its Saitama factory. As I was leaving, Mr. Ashihara told me that at least one surgeon has suggested to him that the Body Weight Support Assist would be useful during long operations, during which doctors are required to stand in a semi-crouched position for hours.