body agency and the ways wearable devices let people regain control of their physical forms

Assistive designs and wearable devices for body agency

Some modern wearable devices and assistive designs entertain users and track their health, but others are created for a more meaningful purpose: to give people control of their own bodies. These tools allow them to walk across the room, type a message using a specific part of their body, speak a sentence without using their mouth, and pick an object up, again. Body agency is a power returned after an incident took it away from the user’s physical form, and some wearable devices and technologies have this exact goal in mind. When visual artist Karolina Wiktor had strokes from 2009, her aneurysm had ruptured, and when she came back to consciousness, her words were gone. Aphasia works like that the person is still present, but their language just isn’t there anymore. For someone who had built her entire artistic practice around performance, writing, and communication, her medical experience completely shifted the ways she used to operate in the artistic world.

Over the next 15 years, she found that when speech disappeared, the body could go on, so she found other ways to channel her art, from drawing to gestures. The result is the Font of Absences, an alphabet she made during bouts of aphasia: letters that are unfinished and illegible, but that record the physical effort of a brain to communicate visually. The artist showcases her work at the exhibition Cartography of Motherhood, on view at Zachęta in Warsaw, which takes all of that and places it inside the context of raising a child while relearning how to communicate. Over fifteen years, Karolina Wiktor and her daughter Iga built a shared language together from drawings, gestures, and the small rituals of daily life. The exhibition maps that process, and visitors can engage with it directly, as they touch the alphabet and draw their own too, allowing them to experience the work of the artist.

exhibition Karolina Wiktor. Cartography of Motherhood at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art. from the left: Lidia Magiera: Hand in Hand, Wiktoria Kuchta: orthosis project, Piotr Pryk: orthosis project supporting the rehabilitation of patient | images of the exhibition courtesy of Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

Modern tools that can be attached to user’s physical forms

The industry of wearable technologies and assistive designs have evolved into helping people regain control of their bodies, again. Bradley Wagman’s grandmother had multiple sclerosis, and he watched her spend years in a wheelchair. As a student at Harvard, he kept thinking about the gap between what technology had done for the digital world and what it had done for something as basic as walking. Foot drop, or the inability to lift the front of the foot during a step, caused by stroke, MS, diabetes, neurological injury, is currently treated with a rigid plastic brace that straps around the leg and sits outside the shoe, making it so visible. Wagman and his co-designer Viktor Bokisch, a US Army veteran, built Sole 1, a sock that fits inside the shoe, embedded with Nitinol actuators, or a shape-memory alloy that contracts when electrically stimulated. 

It does the same as the plastic brace, but using a carbon fiber insole with pressure sensors that tracks where in the gait cycle the foot is as well as a small collar above the ankle that houses the processor. When the system detects the lifting of the foot, it fires the actuators, allowing the user to easily pull their foot from the ground without showing visibly how. Open Bionics, based in Bristol, started from the same frustration about what prosthetic arms looked like and felt like, which are heavy and clinical at the moment. It pushes the company to create Hero ARM, a customizable, 3D printed residual limb that attaches to the user’s body. It weighs under 300 grams, and the modular system means the same socket connects to different attachments for different activities. There’s also a companion app that calibrates grip patterns to the individual user’s muscle signals. 

exhibition Karolina Wiktor. Cartography of Motherhood, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, in the middle: Karolina Wiktor: Table with Font of Abscence, photo by Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta archive

Gadgets for users with different body needs

Aside from the external body parts, the wearable devices and assistive designs also make use of the mouth. It’s the case for Augmental’s MouthPad^, which sits on the roof of the mouth and is custom-fitted from dental resin. It connects via Bluetooth to any phone, laptop, or tablet and translates tongue movements and head gestures into cursor control so people with limited use of their hands and arms are given the ability to navigate the digital world using their tongue and the roof of their mouth. This is the kind of design language that wearable technologies should keep on going for, a series of assistive designs that restores body functions.

The same ethos appears in OnCue, designed by Italian designer Alessandra Galli. It is a keyboard for users with Parkinson’s disease, translating the tremors and the stiffness Parkinson’s causes into actual typed words. Galli’s response was a split, ortholinear keyboard with raised-edge keycaps that guide the fingers into the right position, paired with wrist cuffs that deliver rhythmic haptic feedback, with the vibration helping the user get a consistent typing rhythm. These wearable devices and assistive designs make use of the body parts as benefits, allowing the technologies to serve them with a meaningful means instead of just a targeted purpose.

exhibition Karolina Wiktor. Cartography of Motherhood, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Karolina Wiktor: Font of Abscence, photo by Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta archive

There are also technologies that take on the voice itself, just like Syrinx, built by a team from the University of Tokyo. It came out after the team discovered that around 300,000 people lose their voice each year, mostly through laryngeal cancer or surgery. The existing solution, the electrolarynx, is a handheld device pressed to the throat that produces a flat mechanical buzzing sound. It requires one hand to hold, but sounds nothing like the person using it. The Syrinx team redesigned the whole tool as a hands-free neck brace, and trained a machine learning model on each user’s own voice recordings to reproduce the individual’s vocal patterns through vibration. 

The voice it generates is still not perfect, as the technology is still developing, but the direction is clear that the voice should sound like the user, while leaving their hands free. These wearable devices and assistive designs make a mark on what the future tools for body agency can look out for. These tools share the same goal of finding what the body can still do and building around that instead of what it cannot. The foot still knows how to walk, the tongue is one of the most precise motor organs in the human body, and the muscles in a residual limb still send signals. These projects allow the users with different needs to still use their bodies the ways they should.

exhibition Karolina Wiktor. Cartography of Motherhood, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, photo by Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta archive

view of SOLE¹ bby Bradley Wagman and Viktor Bokisch | images of the project courtesy of Bradley Wagman and Viktor Bokisch

Sole 1, a sock that fits inside the shoe, embedded with Nitinol actuators

Hero ARM is a customizable, 3D printed residual limb | images of the project courtesy of Open Bionics

it attaches directly to the user’s body

the modular system means the same socket connects to different attachments for different activities

OnCue is a keyboard designed by designer Alessandra Galli for users with Parkinson’s disease | images of the project courtesy of Alessandra Galli

it is a split, ortholinear keyboard with raised-edge keycaps

Augmental’s MouthPad^ translates tongue movements and head gestures into cursor control | images of the project courtesy of Augmental

project info:

artists and designers: Karolina Wiktor, Bradley Wagman, Viktor Bokisch, Alessandra Galli | @karolina_wiktor, @alessandragalli_design 

company: Open Bionics, Augmental | @openbionics, @augmentaltech

institution: University of Tokyo | @utokyo_pr

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