Out of the lab and into patients’ hands

In the Harvard Move Lab, mannequins don jackets decorated with electronics and hanging wires. Design drawings are scattered on workbenches, and sewing machines sit among fabric-filled cubbies labeled “knits” or “spacer mesh.”  

It’s palpable creative energy driven by a unifying purpose: Getting helpful technologies out of the lab and into patients’ hands.

Not at all a traditional university lab, the Move Lab is a translational research hub led by Faculty Director Conor Walsh and Executive Director Paul Sabin in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). It employs professional engineers, product developers, and academics who work across disciplines to bring research innovations to market. 

Founded in 2021, the lab’s partners include experts at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School, and its goal is to build a future where “physical ability or advancing age are not the primary limiters for a person’s employment, recreation, or connection to the community.”

“At the end of the day, we want to have impact,” said Walsh, the Paul A. Maeder Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS. “We don’t want to just write papers. We don’t want to just do research in the lab.”  

Walsh also leads Harvard’s Biodesign Lab, which for over a decade has developed robots and medical devices that interact and cooperate with the human body.  

One of the Move Lab’s signature efforts is a soft, wearable robotic device called Reachable, aimed at helping stroke survivors and people with other movement impairments regain mobility and independence.

The Reachable team recently received a three-year, $5 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation that’s aimed at getting practical research into the marketplace quickly. The NSF Convergence Accelerator, under the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, first supported the Harvard team in 2022 with a Phase 1 grant to perform end-user research and create initial prototypes. The team received Phase 2 funding in 2023, with the Move Lab as a core partner, to continue testing and refining. The goal is eventual licensing of their invention to a company.

Out of the clinic, into the home

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. In-person occupational and physical therapy can help, but many patients can’t access regular treatments due to cost or travel requirements. Plus, in-clinic therapies can’t help 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 on everyday tasks, such as putting away dishes or getting a cup of coffee, all while therapeutic benefits are being delivered, Sabin said.

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. 

The Reachable technology 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.”

The Move Lab is also funded by the National Institutes of Health to develop a neuroprosthesis for improving mobility for stroke survivors. And in a past project, Move Lab researchers developed new technology for measuring sensation and muscle activity.

Bringing together multidisciplinary teams

“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.” 

To that end, Walsh’s research team has worked with dozens of patients and end users over the years to test, improve and ultimately translate their devices to startups and industry partners, with past support from the Wyss Institute. They collaborated with Lifeward (formerly ReWalk Robotics) to develop the ReStore Soft Exosuit for improving gait retraining for stroke survivors in clinical settings. 

Verve Motion is a start-up that spun out of the research group whose first product, SafeLift, is focused on reducing the strain on front-line workers performing physically strenuous tasks. 

Walsh and Sabin plan to continue this focus on translation through the Move Lab at SEAS. They’ll grow the team to support a larger range of projects and researchers from other faculty labs at Harvard and from the greater Boston area.  

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 through the Move Lab and a research associate at SEAS. “We have brought stroke survivors into the lab to not just do the typical research study, but to really focus on the user experience.” 

Some feedback they received: Earlier versions were in shirt form and difficult to don independently, particularly for people with only one good arm; to adjust, the team created a vest version. This academic year, the team plans to expand user testing by sending about 10 device prototypes home with patients. 

Among the team’s most valuable partners has been Dr. John Goodson, a longtime physician at MGH who was diagnosed with 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.” 

NSF program director Pradeep Fulay, who recently visited the team, expressed his continued support for the work.

“Dr. Walsh and his entire team reflects the spirit of this convergence accelerator program focused on enhancing the lives of persons with disabilities,” Fulay said. “I am very excited about the tangible outcomes that could result as the team continues to progress toward a highly sophisticated device that makes creative use of the convergence between advanced robotics, apparel design, mechanical engineering, and machine learning.”

Reachable partners include: Massachusetts General Hospital, Cecropia Strong, Imago Rehab, Simbex Product Development, and others.