Abstract
The gap between the functionality of a technology and who it actually serves is rarely a
problem of engineering alone. This portfolio presents two interconnected projects examining rehabilitation exoskeleton technology from both technical and social perspectives. The first is a Capstone design project developing a wearable soft-robotic upper-limb exoskeleton for out-of-hospital rehabilitation, undertaken to address the lack of safe, lightweight devices capable of facilitating therapeutic motion outside clinical settings. The second is an STS research paper investigating how safety- and comfort-driven design tradeoffs in rehabilitation exoskeletons shape device usability and adoption in home contexts, motivated by the observation that technically capable devices frequently fail to achieve sustained real-world use. Together, these projects examine the tension between design and user experience, with the Capstone addressing it through engineering practice and the STS paper providing a theoretical framework for its persistence.
The Capstone project addresses the well-documented inability of most upper limb
exoskeletons to transition from clinical environments into routine home-based use. The design response is a cable-driven soft-robotic exoskeleton prioritizing lightweight architecture, safety-oriented force limits, and ergonomic adaptability across multiple degrees of freedom, drawing on compliant materials and textile interfaces to reduce distal mass and accommodate anatomical variability. Throughout development, constraints related to comfort, ease of donning, and independence of use shaped design tradeoffs alongside biomechanical performance. This reflects a deliberate effort to align the device with the conditions of actual home rehabilitation rather than optimizing solely laboratory metrics.
The project concludes that a soft-robotic architecture can reduce usability barriers
associated with rigid exoskeleton designs while retaining sufficient actuation capability for guided range-of-motion therapy. The work demonstrates that prioritizing comfort and ease of use as primary constraints, rather than post-hoc refinements, produces devices better suited for home use. The tensions encountered, between force output and mass reduction or clinical performance and user-managed setup, are not purely technical problems but reflect the competing priorities of all the stakeholders these devices must serve.
The STS paper asks, how do safety- and comfort-driven design tradeoffs in upper-limb rehabilitation exoskeletons influence usability and adoption in out-of-hospital contexts? The paper applies the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework (Bijker 1987), which treats artifacts as products of negotiation among social groups like engineers, clinicians, patients, caregivers, and institutions. The methodology is a comparative literature review of rigid and soft upper-limb exoskeleton studies, analyzing how design descriptions, evaluation criteria, and deployment contexts reflect the priorities of these competing groups.
The analysis finds that rehabilitation exoskeleton literature is dominated by biomechanical metrics like torque, range of motion, and muscle activation. These metrics reflect engineering and clinical priorities while marginalizing the comfort, perceived safety, and usability concerns most relevant to patients and caregivers. Rigid exoskeletons embody this stabilized framework, optimizing for clinical precision at the cost of home usability, while soft robotic systems offer a challenge to it without redefining the field’s dominant evaluative standard. The paper concludes that sustainable out-of-hospital adoption requires renegotiating what counts as evidence in device design and evaluation, incorporating patient and caregiver experience as primary data, and that this is as much an institutional challenge as a technical one.
Notes
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering
Technical Advisor: Sarah Sun
STS Advisor: Pedro Augusto Francisco
Technical Team Members: Aidan Mermagen, Hannah Tse, Juan Gomez,
Katherine Page, Madelyn Tubbs, Ryan Murray, Sam Moran, Sean Pawlowski, Zoe Benton
