Taking different disabilities into account such as paraplegia and hemiplegia, we had the task to design the means of control of a personal use exoskeleton. The challenge resided in designing with heavy accessibility in mind.
Industrial design Interaction design 3D modeling Visualization 3D animation
4 months | reworked group project
2023 | 2025
I reworked this project on the product side, redefining the product aesthetic and adapting shape for an ease of use, thought for people with limited motricity.
Wandercraft, personal use exoskeleton controller.
Let set the context
Wandercraft is a french medical exoskeleton manufacturer. Their current exoskeleton "Atalante" is meant to be used inside medical facilities. Their new exoskeleton aims at being used at home by disabled people to facilitates their daily activities.
Our focus during this project was to design the means of control of this new exoskeleton.
User Interview.
Conveying interviews with disabled people was key in us understanding their daily struggles. It allowed us to identify opportunities such as hand free controls and being able to easily climb stairs. Drawing different scenarios and use cases of the exoskeleton as none of the interviewees used one before.
How might we provide a human/machine interface that controls a personal use exoskeleton lifting up the mental load of disabled people in their everyday activities throughout versatility and adaptability?
Ideation.
Wide ideation was a must on this project, as we tackled on challenging context, the control need to be precise and intentional, but discreet enough to not disturb the user daily activity or being triggered by accident
Monster Mock-up.
Monster mock-up allowed us to quickly test many differents position for the controller as well as trigger action
Bodystorming.
Using the monster mock-up to experiment the interfaces we found previously. This session helped us to discover intuitive ways to interact with the exoskeleton. Thanks to a bodystorming session, we’ve tested our prototype We had to find the right balance between intuitiveness and movement that cannot be triggered by accident.
Promising technology.
Electromyography measures the electrical activity of muscles in response to nerve stimulation. It uses electrodes placed on the skin. Back at the time Meta was developing some prototypes from their VR department and recently Apple implemented new gesture control in the Apple watches (from late 2023) that are close to the intuitive trigger we proposed.
Watch as a main controller
The watch is our main controller, hosting the different infrared captors to translate electrical activity inside the wrist combined to a gyroscope for more complexe gesture.
Headset as a gyroscope
headset is used as a gyroscope to tell the system the way the user is looking towards. It is also a mean of sending the user haptic and sound feedbacks.
LiDar sensor test.
As highlighted during interviews the biggest obstacle and challenge an exoskeleton has to face is to go up stairs and steps. We wanted to see if LiDAR sensors used in real time would be a nice implementation to the exoskeleton to detect obstacles in particular steps and stairs. The exoskeleton could automaticaly adjust the height of its step.
Controlling the exoskeleton
As the controls are at the core of our project we paid extra attention to them. We wanted the controls to be natural especially for people with disabilities with but at the same time not triggered by parasitic movements.We distinguished actions performed from a still position to the ones in a moving state and adapted the triggers as well as the different feedbacks the user will receive.
Old vs New.
I decided to re work the shapes of the controller, to get away from the generic looks of bone conduction and using the newest technology for the wrist controler
