'But how will you control them?' I hear you ask. Good question. It's all well and good having motors that cause your arm to bend, but how do I actually control them so they activate when and how I want them to?
Way ahead of you.
I have no idea how those officially made exoskeletons like HAL and the XOS exoskeleton do it, and I can only think of two ways (neither of which I can imagine are how those two official ones do it).
Firstly, mind control. There are devices you can get which you wear like a head band (and are in fact thinner) that pick up the electrical signals coming from your brain. So you can program other devices, like your phone, for instance, to do something upon a certain thought picked up by the mind reading device (presumably sent across through Bluetooth or something of the sort). You could program that to recognise the signal produced when you move your arm, and then program the motors (connecting them to a microchip, I mean) to activate when that signal is picked up.
But that could be awfully complicated. The other way I came up with (which is what I'm actually going to do) is have a type pressure pad on each side of my forearm. I don't know what exactly they're called, but I know they exist (I read about them years ago in a book, but it was a library book so I don't have it anymore). What they do is, an electric current only goes through them when you press on them, and the more you press them, the more of a current goes through it. But I'll have a layer of padding between my arm and the pressure pads, (I'll experiment with the thickness required) so I should be able to move my arm about freely without activating them. And then when I encounter any resistance, like when I'm trying to lift something that weighs a bit, my arm will push against the pressure pad, thus completing the circuit to the motors and activating them. And of course, the more I press against them, the more power they get, so the more they'll help.
So now you know. But, as my highly dubious friends pointed out when I went to see them yesterday, even with ten motors pulling on the forearm, they won't be as strong as me. So according to them, that's no use. But they're missing something very important. It doesn't need to be. It's not a case of 'my strength or the exoskeleton's strength'; it's a case of 'my strength plus the exoskeleton's strength'. Imagine I'm in an arm wrestle, for instance. If an 8 year old, who obviously is considerably weaker than someone almost twice his age, comes along and helps me, it is going to help. It doesn't matter that he's not as strong as me. It's still going to make a difference.
So when I'm trying to, oh I don't know, tear a pillar in half, my arm will be pulling from inside the suit, pressing it against the pillar. So there's my strength trying to pull it in half, plus the motors in the suit trying to bend in the arm in the direction I'm pressing.
Now, I'm not expecting HAL level strength (though I have no idea how strong that is). What I am expecting, however, is for it to improve my strength at least slightly.
So yeah, hopefully that should work...