A major problem for people with Cerebral Palsy and traumatic brain injuries is that their condition causes a muscle to be constantly flexed. With Joe, the person who we worked with, it was his left bicep that was constantly tensed. The flexoskeleton detects action potentials in Joe's triceps, the muscle that counteracts the biceps, and uses a motor to pull Joe's arm open.

We started the studio by learning about the Lokomat, a machine that corrects the gaits of people with the problem mentioned above. At first we decided to make an arm brace that helped Joe be able to move his arm again. We decided that pressure would be applied by the brace and that his triceps would be able to do the rest. We then changed to focusing on the idea of a soft exoskeleton, an exoskeleton that has very little structure.  After a day of working on the idea we abandoned it because we realized that if we put the motor on Joe's back, where we were planning to do it, it would pull Joe's arm back instead of opening it up. We realized that we could fit a small motor on Joe's arm and we returned to the idea. We think that the flexoskeleton will be able to improve the mobility of people with cerebral palsy and traumatic brain injuries.

 Check out the latest version of the fllexoskeleton here.

A casting device that attaches to a wheelchair and helps people with low motor skills to cast again.

We created a device that will help people fish again, this device will attach to a wheel chair and with simple motions will allow people to cast. The main consumer of our product will be people who loved to fish and for medical reasons cant do it any more. One of the things most disable people want to do, is to become as autonomous as they can get, and with this project we are trying to make fishing a activity they can do by them selves.

To make this project possible we design a compact model/base that we later on laser cut our of wood, this piece will essentially have an elevated structure on the far ends with a whole in the top where we glued a ball bearing, trough that bearing an aluminum rod will spin, after that we 3D printed a piece that has space for the aluminum rod to go thought and set screw holes to fix it in to rod, and on the Y axis we have a cylindrical piece that holds the fishing rod. on each side of the joint piece we have a piece that also has space for the rod to go trough but this time they have an other rod that goes up and attaches to a piece that releases the line when we need to, and on the other side those pieces have springs to be able to push that button that releases the line and also to push the rod and make the casting motion, for this project we mainly used 3D printed parts and laser cut pieces.

Our project is a mobile prosthetic that stimulates contralateral movement in the arms, training the forearms to mimic the natural human gait. 

The Armomat is a portable prosthetic which forces one arm to move back when the other is pushed forward, and vice versa. We created this project for a person named Joe, who suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was 18 years old, and has very little control over his right arm. He told us that he had trouble maintaining his balance when walking due to the fact that his left arm does not perform the natural human gait, as he cannot control it; because of this, Joe has to hold his weak arm with the arm he has control over, and we wanted to create something that would assist him. After two very work intensive weeks, my partner and I created several different iterations of methods that would help Joe walk normally, and after encountering countless issues, we created the Armomat.

A device that lets two people support the body weight of someone who is disabled and unable to support themself, allowing him or her to dance freely and return to a sport they love.

Our project is a device made to help a women named Marina, who suffered a traumatic brain injury that resulted in a partial loss of motion on the left side of her body and the inability to dance. Dance brings a story to life, animates a feeling, and spreads cultural awareness, but most importantly it's an expression of creativity and self. Dance brings beauty to the world and everyone in it. The device we developed will allow Marina to return to the art of dance, an activity that she loves, with her siblings who will be there to support her physically and emotionally. Our project addresses the post injury issues of exercise and physical interaction. By helping her to dance, Marina will be able to spend time with her siblings doing something they all love. In order to make this device we used PVC pipe for the two poles that makeup the frame and between them is a metal "Lazy Susan" with a harness in the middle. This allows Marina to spin around without needing to worry about holding onto something or falling. The pieces that attach the "Lazy Susan" to the pipes were 3D printed as were the pieces that stop the "Lazy Susan" from sliding to far up and down the poles. Additionally, caps on the ends of the poles which hold strapping that attaches to the support harnesses is also 3D printed.