Supporting plans and mobile devices for corps agencies
Some contemporary portable devices and supporting plans entertain users and monitor their health, but others have been created for a more meaningful purpose: to give people control over their bodies. These tools allow them to walk around the room, type a message using a specific part of their body, speak a sentence without using their mouth, and pick up an object again. Body Agency is a power that is returned after an incident has withdrawn it from the user’s physical form, and certain wearable devices and technologies have this very goal. When visual artist Karolina Wiktor had strokes since 2009, her aneurysm had ruptured and when she regained consciousness, her words were gone. Aphasia works so 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 changed the ways she was used to operating in the art world.
Over the next 15 years, she found that when speech disappeared, the body could continue, so she found other ways to channel her art, from drawing to gesture. The result is the font of absences, an alphabet he made during periods of aphasia: letters incomplete and illegible, but which record a brain’s physical effort to communicate visually. The artist presents her work at the exhibition Cartography of Motherhood, in Zachęta, Warsaw, which takes all of this and places it in the context of raising a child while relearning how to communicate. Over fifteen years, Karolina Wiktor and her daughter Iga built a common language from drawings, gestures and small rituals of everyday life. The exhibition charts this process and visitors can engage directly with it as they touch the alphabet and draw their own, allowing them to experience the artist’s work.
Karolina Wiktor exhibition. Cartography of Motherhood, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, middle: Karolina Wiktor: Table with Font of Abscence, photo Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta Archive
Modern tools that can be attached to the user’s physical forms
The industry of wearable technologies and assistive designs has evolved to help people regain control of their bodies. Bradley Wagman’s grandmother had multiple sclerosis and 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 forefoot during a step, caused by stroke, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, neurological injury, is currently treated with a rigid plastic brace that ties around the foot and sits outside the shoe, making it so visible. Wagman and his co-designer Viktor Bokisch, a US Army veteran, built the 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 uses a carbon fiber insole with pressure sensors that track where the foot is in the gait cycle as well as a small collar above the ankle that houses the processor. When the system detects the leg being lifted, it fires the actuators, allowing the user to easily pull their leg off the ground without visibly showing how. Open Bionics, based in Bristol, started out of the same frustration with how prosthetic hands looked and felt, which are heavy and clinical at the moment. He pushes it company to create the Hero ARM, a customizable, 3D printed residual limb that attaches to the user’s body. It weighs less than 300 grams and the modular system means that the same socket connects to different components for different activities. There’s also a companion app that calibrates grip patterns to each user’s muscle signals.
Karolina Wiktor exhibition. Cartography of Motherhood in Zachęta – National Art Gallery. from left: Lidia Magiera: Hand-to-hand, Wiktoria Kuchta: orthosis project, Piotr Pryk: orthosis project supporting patient rehabilitation | exhibition images courtesy of Zachęta – National Art Gallery
Gadgets for users with different body needs
In addition to external body parts, wearable devices and assistive designs also use the mouth. Such is the case with Augmental’s MouthPad^, which sits on the roof of the mouth and is molded from dental resin. It connects via Bluetooth to any phone, laptop or tablet and translates tongue movements and head movements into cursor control so people with limited use of their hands and arms can navigate the digital world using their tongue and the roof of their mouth. This is the kind of design language that wearable technologies should continue, a series of supportive designs that restore body functions.
The same ethos appears in OnCue, designed by Italian designer Alessandra Galli. It’s a keyboard for users with Parkinson’s disease that translates the tremors and stiffness Parkinson’s causes into actual typed words. Galli’s response was a split, orthogonal keyboard with raised keys that guide fingers into the right position, combined with wrist cuffs that provide rhythmic haptic feedback, with vibration helping the user maintain a consistent typing rhythm. These wearable devices and assistive designs use body parts to their advantage, allowing technologies to serve them with meaningful means rather than targeted ends.
Karolina Wiktor exhibition. Cartography of Motherhood, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Karolina Wiktor: Font of Abscence, photo Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta Archive
There are also technologies that take over the voice itself, such as Syrinx, built by a team from the University of Tokyo. It came after the team discovered that around 300,000 people lose their voice every year, mostly due to laryngeal cancer or surgery. The existing solution, the electrolarynx, is a portable device that is pressed against the throat and produces a flat mechanical buzzing sound. It requires one hand to hold, but looks nothing like the person using it. The Syrinx team redesigned the entire tool as a hands-free neck brace and trained a machine learning model on each user’s voice recordings to reproduce the person’s vocal patterns through vibration.
The voice it produces isn’t perfect yet, as the technology is still developing, but the direction is clear that the voice should sound like the user, leaving their hands free. These wearable devices and supporting designs give a sign of what future tools for the body may look like. These tools share the same goal of finding what the body can still do and building around that instead of what it can’t. The leg 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 users with different needs to still use their bodies the way they should.
Karolina Wiktor exhibition. Cartography of Motherhood, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, photo Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta Archive
view of SOLE¹ bby Bradley Wagman and Viktor Bokisch | Project images courtesy of Bradley Wagman and Viktor Bokisch
Sole 1, sock that fits inside the shoe, embedded with Nitinol actuators
