Myoelectric Exoskeleton Assistive Arm Brace

My daughter, Lorelei, was diagnosed with Acute Flaccid Myelitis a rare polio-like syndrome and lost the use of her arm. Traditional treatments would have given her about a 5% chance at recovery, and state of the art treatments were too costly. Without any experience, we decided to tackle this challenge by setting up an open project and reaching out to experts for help.

We have now built a robotic assistive arm that is helping her move and which has increased her chances of rehabilitation. Over the last several weeks she has now slowly started to regain the use of her arm and is able to move!

Find the instructions here to build your own.

NOTE: These instructions will for the moment only take you as far as building a device that will either use a singular muscle sensor (that will really only work if you have a really strong muscle) or a device that uses a potentiometer (a radio-dial-like knob) that can be used to control the device. There are still three key challenges we are overcoming and if you can help us please do so! We should have overcome those challenges within the next 6 months (Mid to Late 2018).

These instructions could theoretically be used to create a device for any limb, however, the below instructions are for a left arm and you would need to make necessary changes in the design to make it work for other use cases. I'll try document those considerations below in the instructions.

Disclaimer: My daughter and I don't know what we are doing, we are not experts in this field and have no medical training! All information, thought, and code described here is intended for informational and educational purposes only. This site makes no attempt at HIPAA privacy compliance. Use of code is without warranty or support of any kind. Please review the LICENSE found within each repository for further details. Use at your own risk, and do not use the information or code to make medical decisions.

The instructions can be found here on our wiki