Chinese exoskeletons, screenless wearables and home-fitness devices dominated a theme at IFA Berlin 2026, blurring the line between sporting goods, consumer electronics and personal health and suggesting how suppliers expect consumers to move and measure activity indoors.
The show was not about single breakthrough products but about a pattern: Chinese manufacturers moving quickly into emerging segments, selling direct to consumers, leaning on performance marketing and TikTok creators, compressing margins and iterating hardware fast before larger global brands react.
Walking Messe Berlin’s halls, visitors encountered robot dogs, football-playing humanoids and more Mandarin on the floor than German at times, but behind the spectacle a clearer story emerged about connected fitness, wearables and lifestyle infrastructure.
Exoskeletons leave the clinic for the trail
One of the clearest shifts at IFA was powered exoskeletons crossing from rehabilitation and industry into consumer outdoor gear. Hypershell presented Halo, a full-leg system that weighs 2.6 kilograms, delivers up to 1,490 watts of peak power and uses a removable 370-gram battery rated for up to 20 kilometres; CEO Kelvin Sun described Halo as “a complete rebuild” of the consumer exoskeleton. Ascentiz offered a modular approach: an H hip module and a K knee module that share an Exo-Belt housing the battery and controller, swap via a quick-release mechanism and run on an open-source software layer called BodyOS; pricing starts at €1,599 for the H module and rises to €3,999 for the combined H and K Ultra system.
Other exhibitors reinforced the trend: VIGX already rents exoskeletons to visitors at Chinese mountain resorts, AlpWalk positioned its hip-assist S1 to older consumers as a safety product, and NAVEE showed a 1.8-kilogram trekking exoskeleton built around AI motion tracking. The trade strategy on display — modular pricing, resort rentals and lower-cost access models — aims to reduce the barrier to a category that could otherwise cost more than €1,600 for early buyers.
Wearables give up the screen
IFA 2026 saw fewer smartwatches and more smart rings and screenless bands. RingConn introduced a third-generation smart ring adding vascular trend data and vibration alerts to continuous sleep, activity and stress tracking, and the company highlighted that these features work without a subscription requirement. Singapore’s ACTXA showcased a screenless Spark Band that pairs sleep and recovery tracking with an AI-generated, non-invasive glucose snapshot. A parallel trend was rings as interfaces rather than sensors: US companies Prolo Ring and KiWear demonstrated gesture-control rings intended to operate computers, phones and extended-reality headsets and in some cases to serve as dictation devices. By contrast, Withings framed its IFA releases around clinical credibility rather than lifestyle or sport.
Home fitness built for working and social movement
Chinese brands used IFA’s home-fitness cluster to test the premise that Europeans might work and exercise simultaneously. MERACH brought the European premiere of its UltraWalk W60 Plus walking pad, featuring a brushless motor rated for 15,000 hours, an electronically controlled incline, a 53-decibel operating volume and a 150-kilogram weight capacity; European preorders run through Sept. 20 with an early-bird price of €379.99, down from a €459.99 list price. DeerRun tied its walking pads and treadmills to PitPat, a platform for virtual races and leaderboards — “your treadmill becomes a stadium,” said general manager Tex Yang — and showed three PitPat-compatible products while operating a retail store in the Houston area. Companies including UREVO and China’s KingSmith (WalkingPad line) indicated a coordinated push by Chinese manufacturers to establish walking desks and compact treadmills as a lasting category rather than a pandemic-era accessory.
Robots borrow sport to introduce themselves
Sport made robotics legible to a general audience at IFA. RoboCup, staged with Berlin United from Humboldt University, ran autonomous robot football matches to show real-time decision-making, while Tenniix displayed a portable AI-vision tennis robot that tracks the ball, scores rallies and adjusts drills as a training partner. Humanoid and legged-robot companies such as Unitree, MagicLab and AGIBOT used movement and play to demonstrate balance, perception and autonomy. One uncomfortable footnote: some of the robotic platforms shown as consumer technology are also being adapted for military use or developed with battlefield scenarios in mind.
None of these products fits neatly into traditional sporting-goods categories: exoskeleton makers do not present themselves as outdoor brands, smart-ring companies increasingly position as health platforms, and walking-pad makers borrow from productivity and gaming. Yet they are competing for the same consumer attention and spending, making the boundary between sporting goods, consumer electronics and personal health harder to draw at IFA 2026.
