Not a traditional university lab, Harvard University’s Move Lab employs professional engineers, product developers, and academics who work across disciplines to bring research innovations to market. The lab is focused on human performance enhancement to protect people’s physical ability to guard against injury, extend their abilities beyond the limits of advancing age, and restore them to people who have lost them. They have developed wearable solutions that support functional movements and allow impaired individuals to more easily interact with their environment.
What makes the Move Lab unusual, said Faculty Director Conor Walsh, is that “we don’t want to just write papers. We don’t want to just do research in the lab.” A current project at the lab is a soft, wearable robotic device called Reachable, aimed at helping stroke survivors and people with other movement impairments regain mobility and independence.
Of the 1 million stroke survivors in the United States each year, many suffer movement loss in their arm or shoulder, rendering them unable to work or perform basic tasks. Although in-person occupational and physical therapy can help, in-clinic therapies can’t assist patients with the immediate impacts of mobility loss in their daily lives.
Assistive robotic devices like Reachable could not only provide at-home therapy but also enable independence for everyday tasks, such as putting away dishes or getting a cup of coffee, all while therapeutic benefits are being delivered, said Executive Director Paul Sabin.
Reachable is lightweight and can be worn like a harness. It has a soft under-arm balloon that inflates and deflates and is fitted with sensors that tracks the user’s movement, understands their progress, and adapts the level of support accordingly. It is meant to immediately start exercising muscles to help the brain relearn. “After a stroke, it’s the control system that synchronizes and initiates all the movements that’s broken — not the muscles,” said Sabin. “If we can get this to people before their muscles atrophy or before the disease progresses, then they can focus on trying to recover their control system.”
“One of the challenges in commercializing new technologies in the area of wearables, digital health, and collaborative robotics is that you need to show real-world value with real-world users,” Walsh said. “This is a challenge for academic groups, as typically creating advanced product-like prototypes that work robustly and meet user needs is not a core skill set. In addition, deploying these technologies in large studies in the home or community requires deep clinical and regulatory expertise.”
Over the past year, the team has tested Reachable with over 30 patients who visited the lab and were recruited through clinical collaborator Dr. David Lin at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We are making a big effort to make the device more compact, lightweight, compliant, and easy to use,” said David Pont, Reachable’s technical lead. “We have brought stroke survivors into the lab to not just do the typical research study but to really focus on the user experience.”
Based on user feedback, they learned that their earlier versions, which were in shirt form, were difficult to don independently, particularly for people with only one good arm. So, the team created the current vest version.
Among the team’s most valuable partners has been Dr. John Goodson, a longtime physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2021. Goodson joined the team to offer user testing after they provided him with a stripped-down version of the Reachable device that he could use at home to help him eat meals. “The experience as a participant has been particularly interesting, because it is at the interface of design and engineering,” said Goodson, whose feedback helped the team improve the device’s wearability and comfort. “It’s been interactive all the way along. Interactive with me, and the team, but also, it’s been fun to watch the team interact with themselves as they problem solve.”
This article was written by Ed Brown, Associate Editor, SAE Media Group. For more information, contact David Pont Esteban at
