I’m facing downhill, doing slow awkward zigs and zags on my skis. My legs and thighs are killing me. But making a right turn, I lead with my big toe, pushing it down–and suddenly I get a boost of power to my knees, and I literally feel lighter and my legs stop hurting.

I’m not in Tahoe or Aspen, the snow-covered slopes of Utah, or Chamonix. In fact, I’m in a warehouse in San Francisco’s Inner Mission, strapped into what amounts to a skiing treadmill inside the offices of Roam Robotics. And I’m wearing a prototype of Roam’s lightweight exoskeleton for skiers, an affordable wearable device designed to give skiers of any skill level a boost of power that can take their performance to the next level.

Roam’s founder and CEO is Tim Swift, a longtime veteran of Ekso Bionics, one of the world’s leaders in exoskeletons. Swift loved what Ekso was building, but balked at the hefty price tag that came with systems designed to help the disabled walk. Building devices that aren’t accessible to the masses didn’t make sense to him anymore. So he struck out on his own, aiming to democratize exoskeletons. “We set out to make devices that completely change the cost curve and the weight curve,” Swift says. “We put devices on where [people] are.”

For some time, Roam has been working with the military on systems that help Navy Seals walk and run faster and more efficiently. After wearing one of those devices, someone who had never run faster than a six-minute mile reported hitting 5,280 feet in 4.5 minutes.

Skiing The Perfect Use Case

Now the company is readying its first consumer exoskeleton, and Roam believes skiing is the perfect use case given that its exoskeletons deliver power to the legs, fit well with an active lifestyle, and represent a large potential market. So skiers better get ready to start seeing people zipping by them effortlessly on the slopes wearing what appears to be little more than standard leg braces.

When released, Roam plans on focusing largely on the rental market, and it thinks it can quickly make back the cost of the devices in a few weeks that way, while also iterating the technology as they learn what works and what doesn’t. It also plans on selling a small number of devices at about $2,000 a pop.

At its core, Roam’s devices are about delivering power with a low weight cost–and benefitting anyone, no matter how good a skier you are. Experts should find themselves able to do turns they couldn’t before, Swift predicts, or go comfortably into the backcountry, while leisure skiers should be able to stay out on the slopes all day and even ski multiple full days in a row, even if they’re not in shape. Older skiers should be able to ski like they did when they were younger and stronger.